Airbnb Beats Google As The Best Place To Work In 2016

Glassdoor, the online recruiting marketplace, announced today the winners of its eighth annual Employees' Choice Awards, honoring the Best Places to Work in 2016 across North America and parts of Europe.

The list is quite surprising, with Airbnb taking the top slot, and Google (last year’s No.1 employer) falling to eighth position. Bain and Company came in Second, followed by Guidewire (3rd), Hubspot (4th), Facebook (5th), LinkedIn (6th), Boston Consulting Group (7th), Google (8th), Nestlé Purina PetCare (9th) and Zillow (10th).

Even more surprising was that major companies like Apple, Adobe and others did not make to the top-ten list. Adobe was ranked 19th, Apple 25th, Twitter 26th, Akamai 31st, Nike 47th.

“The Glassdoor Employees' Choice Awards are based solely on the input of employees who voluntarily provide anonymous feedback, by completing a company review, about their job, work environment and employer over the past year”, the press release said.

Geek Wire explains that companies are required to have at least 1,000 employees and 75 company reviews on Glassdoor to be considered for this list. Glassdoor uses an algorithm to calculate the rankings based on the quantity, quality and consistency of Glassdoor-approved company reviews shared by U.S.-based employees between November 3, 2014 and November 1, 2015.

The report also pointed out that Airbnb (#1, 4.6 rating) is among 13 employers debuting as Best Places to Work this year, along with Expedia (#16, 4.1 rating), Delta Air Lines (#21, 4.0 rating) and Red Bull (#46, 3.9 rating), among others. So far, Amazon and Microsoft have failed to make it to the top 50 since Glassdoor started releasing the annual list in 2009.