Prosple debuts new methodology for Top 100 Graduate Employers list

Who We Consider

We began by considering all employers on our 300+ sites. (We have so many sites because besides our own sites – such as Prosple Australia, Prosple New Zealand, and Prosple Philippines – we also set up graduate job portals for universities who partner with us.)

Anyways, since all graduate employers are welcome to join these sites, we started out with a list of thousands of employers. To narrow down this list, we filtered out employers without any page views, applications, or reviews. 

This left us with a list of 3500 companies, which we then categorised by country.

🚀 Note that we consider all graduate employers – whether they are free or paying members of our site. This makes our data more comprehensive than other rankings, which may only account for results from their paying clients.

How We Rank Employers

Now that we had a list of eligible employers, we needed to figure out how attractive each one would be to students on the hunt for a job. 

So we evaluated them on two criteria: student popularity and program quality. We’ll get into what these mean later, but for now just know that each of these criteria was weighted equally.

🚀 Our list is the only one of its kind (that we know of at least) which factors in both criteria. We believe this gives employers a more comprehensive view of how their graduate programs are doing while allowing students to better gauge who the top employers really are.

How We Gauge Student Popularity

A measure of how sought-after an employer is, student popularity reflects whether students aspire to work for a company. (If you’re a student, think of it as a vote of confidence from your peers!)

We assessed popularity based on two factors: page views and application numbers.

Page views refers to the number of times someone viewed an employer’s profile while application numbers refer to the number of applications that students started on our sites. (They usually need to finish the applications on the employer’s site.) 

For reference, we get around 8 million visitors and more than 1.3 million applications a year – a decent sample size for us to gauge the popularity of all our employers.

How We Gauge Program Quality

On the other hand, program quality is a measure of what it’s actually like to work at a company. We assessed quality using real employee reviews from our surveys.

Every year, we create a survey, which we invite all employers to send to their entry-level hires. On the survey, we ask respondents to rate their employers on 12 factors, including overall satisfaction. We then use each employer’s average satisfaction rating as their quality score.

To be fair, we then adjusted employers’ quality score based on two factors: 

1. The age of their reviews (The newer their reviews the better).
2. The number of reviews (The more reviews the better).

Finally, we derived a final score (out of 10) for each employer based on their popularity and quality, ranked them in order of their final score, and featured the top 100 on our sites!

Why We Do What We Do

As you can see, we put a lot of thought into making our ranking system fair and reliable. That’s because we remember what it was like going through the recruitment process ourselves – and how difficult it was to make informed decisions due to the sheer lack of data.

Our rankings list also help employers evaluate the success of their graduate programs and identify areas for improvement – helping them craft even better experiences for their future hires.

So if you haven’t already, check out our Top 100 lists: 

• Australia’s Top 100 Graduate Employers
• New Zealand’s Top 100 Graduate Employers
• The Philippines’ Top 100 Graduate Employers

And if you’re an employer looking to elevate your graduate program, we can help with that too – Contact us here.