Some organisations struggle to hire the employees but others are in the fortunate situation of having people seek them out for employment. It would be interesting to know which companies are actually being sought by potential employees and in what numbers.

The nuances of this are actually quite complex as there are a number of difficulties to take in to consideration;

• The different ways a searcher may express interest in employment e.g. careers, applications, jobs, job, job in a location etc etc
• The possible misinterpretations of brand names
• The sheer numbers of brands to be examined.

The best (though far from perfect) approach is therefore to adopt a consistent approach in all cases. This table shows the number of exact Google queries for a brand + job originating from the United States in October 2012.

Where there is a very clear intent with similar numbers they are combined as a single entry e.g. government jobs, federal government jobs, gov jobs, us government jobs are aggregated in to ‘Government’.

The top companies are a mixture of aspirational e.g. Google (3rd) and the FBI (9th) and major employers such as UPS (3rd) and Walmart (5th). To put this in perspective, Walmart receives roughly 17% less interest than Google despite employing 2.1 million people – roughly 39 times more than the famous search engine.

A Human Resources department concerned with measuring the attractiveness of it’s organization can easily use a similar methodology to gauge their appeal to potential employees versus competitors and to measure their changing appeal as an employer over time.

For a more general view of brand value via keyowrd resarch, try ‘Tracking a brand with keyword research‘.