A tip of the hat to Amitai Givertz for bringing to my attention the BusinessWeek article entitled The Best Places to Launch a Career: The Top 50 Employers for New College Grads.

This is the first time that BusinessWeek has compiled this ranking of the largest employers of college students and recent graduates. The ranking of the biggest employers of college students and recent graduates in part reflects a beauty contest because employers with name recognition with students will tend to outperform those employers who do not have a strong brand name on-campus. But the rankings go beyond mere name recognition with students by first including feedback from directors of undergraduate career services to find out which employers were creating buzz on campus. Those organizations which had the most buzz were then asked to complete a questionnaire about pay, benefits, retention, and training programs. BusinessWeek then compared those answers with other employers in the same industries in an effort to create an apples-to-apples ranking within various industry sectors. Finally Universum Communications supplied data on the finalists.

I was happy to see that of the top 55 biggest employers of college students and recent graduates, 32 currently have jobs posted to CollegeRecruiter.com. Some of the others don't have job postings but are using our resume bank, targeted emails, banner ads, etc. The largest employers of college students and recent graduates were: