Why Brazen’s Top 50 Gen Y Companies List is Horse$hit

I have to start by saying that I LOVE Penelope Trunk—love, love, love her. Which is, I guess, why I’m so surprised and disappointed by her company, Brazen Careerist’s, Top 50 Gen Y Companies list. These were among the criteria companies had to meet to be considered for this list:

1. Had to have more than 2500 employees. Um, what? Why?
2. Had to employ “2000+ bachelor’s degree or higher graduates in order to limit the sample to companies that are major employers of bachelor’s (or higher) graduates. Huh? I don’t even understand what this means.
3. Percentage of Gen Y employees. Ok, this kind of makes sense.
4. Median total cash compensation of Gen Y employees. I thought Gen Y doesn’t care about money, they just want to save the world?
5. Gender balance. Good–no argument here.
6. Green score, as determined by Climate Counts. So, what–did Climate Counts partly sponsor this list or something? Otherwise, wtf?

That’s it? That’s truly all Gen Yers care about when looking for a job? Are you kidding me? I might not be a Gen Yer, but I read the paper and lots of blogs and watch the news. I thought Gen Yers don’t want to follow in their parent’s footsteps, don’t want to sell out to the man, want to save the world, want work/life balance, want cool work environments…basically, do NOT want to work for big corporations like Pepsi or Citicorp. Why on earth would this list not include companies with fewer than 2,500 employees? Doesn’t that pretty much automatically keep any nonprofit organization out of the running off the bat? Where are the criteria like social responsibility score, commitment work/life balance, professional development, etc?

To me this list is basically an ad for Payscale and totally flagrant in its disregard for actually being useful to Gen Yers researching potential employers. I mean, everyone’s gotta eat and pay the bills, but come on Penelope–you couldn’t do better than this?

How about doing another list–this time not using total bullshit qualifications and including nonprofits?

Update: Penelope wrote a post defending the methodology they used to come up with the list. Nice try but, sorry–no cigar. “If a company has a strong green initiative it’s because they understand the value of being a good corporate citizen.” No, it’s because they understand the value of greenwashing.