Apple Among Top Three Companies Favored by Tech Recruits

The students have spoken: Apple Computer Inc. is ranked third in Research and Markets’ “8th Annual State of Student Recruiting Report (2006) - Industry Focus: Technology.” This is another score for the big Apple: an in-depth study of 787 undergraduate and MBA technology students ranked Apple as above IBM and Yahoo! as a desired employer.

However, Apple was beat out by top-ranked Google and second-ranked MicroSoft. More than 60 tech companies participated in the survey, and the report reveals how technology students view prospective employers, how they determine where to apply, where they choose to work, and gives a comprehensive look at the current tech recruiting landscape.

The Technology Edition of this 8th Annual State of Student Recruiting Report http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c40495 provides answers to:
• Which technology employers do students most want to work for?
• What compensation offers do students expect and actually receive?
• Whose offers did students accept and whose did they decline, and why?
• How do specific technology firms place in the overall student rankings for top employer, best campus recruiter and best recruiting website?
• Which other industries are successfully targeting technology graduates?

The full 107-page report is available at cost and mentions other companies such as Intel, Texas Instruments, Amazon, Dell, Motorola, eBay, Hewlett-Packard, and Verizon.

On MacSimumNews.com, user siva commented about the survey. Some of her comments were that “IT professionals are generally support staff and are not the backbone of the company. I would say Apple’s backbone would be software engineers, hardware engineers, industrial engineers, thermal, and designers. I think a lot of people misunderstand what exactly an IT professional does.  They just support the computer systems needed for the rest of the core people to do their work effectively. That is why many companies have outsourced IT work since they are not considered the core.”

And in the same posting chain, user Juan Carlos de Burbon disagreed with siva:

“There is a paradigm in business today where information technology isn’t viewed as a separate part of the business process but more as an integral part of the business process.  There is a tremendous effort to better align technology with the business versus the previous approach of aligning the business around technology…IT professionals no longer just support computer systems but rather they support business solution technologies.”

And Apple’s ranking might just be due to its ability to adapt to what its customers want (so why not adapt to desirable qualities of employers too?). In a recent New York Times article, Apple’s new operating system, the iPod, and the new line of computers that run on Intel processors are cited as the reason behind more Windows users considering the switch.

“More than 12,000 software applications have been developed to run on the Mac OS X platform since it was introduced in 2001, according to Apple, including popular programs like Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, the Firefox Web browser…But the world of Mac software is still smaller than what is available in the Windows world.”

Security is mentioned in the report as another bonus of being a Mac user. “In Windows, antivirus and antispyware programs have become essential for defending against a variety of threats. So far, the Mac OS X operating system has not been infiltrated by viruses, and it remains free from the type of spyware threats that spread in the wild and go after Windows users, according to Symantec, maker of Norton Antivirus. But when Windows is run on Intel-based Macs, for example through Boot Camp or Parallels, it is vulnerable to the same virus and spyware threats that can affect conventional Windows-based PC’s.”