The AI career tool Kickresume wanted to explore what company values are important for job seekers and how companies are matching them. After analysing 158 companies from around the world on LinkedIn, the firm found out that 23% of companies’ values do not reflect what job seekers actually want.
Instead, job seekers are looking for purpose, work-life balance and social responsibility, compared to what companies’ values typically are. The most common company values are emphasis on quality and customer focus.
But job seekers disagree…
Do the company values of top companies around the world match up to those of the average job seeker?
Kickresume’s survey suggests not. It was found that the top three values that most companies focus on are Emphasis on Quality with 69% of companies highlighting this, Customer Focus at 56.3%, and Innovation at 54.4%.
The study also found out what job seekers want the most from companies when looking for a new role, drawing on a LinkedIn survey. The career tool identified 6 job seeker priority values and found that businesses do not reflect 50% of what job seekers look for.
Instead, it was found that job seekers value Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Career Pathing, Learning & Development, Purpose & Mission, and having a healthy Work-Life Balance. Kickresume found that the six most common company values only reflect half of these job seeker priorities, with just Purpose & Mission at 46.2%, Work-Life Balance at 36.7%, and CSR at 31.6% being the only job seeker priorities in the list of the top 6 most common values listed by companies.
Career pathing
The research revealed that 77.2% of companies reflect at least one job seeker priority in their LinkedIn descriptions, and 22.8% of companies reflected none at all, which is a significant chunk.
The other three job seeker values, DEI, Career Pathing, and Learning & Development, were areas where companies seem to keep out of their social media descriptions. DEI was only found in 18.4% of LinkedIn pages, followed by Career Pathing at 2.5%, and Learning & Development at 1.9%.
The research also revealed that Nike and HDFC Bank reflect the most job seeker priority values in their LinkedIn pages out of all the companies included in the study. Both Nike and HDFC bank have 4 of the values that job seekers want. Nike’s values that might appeal most to job seekers are: Purpose & Mission, DEI, Work-Life Balance, and CSR. They also prioritize Ambition & Drive, and Innovation.
HDFC Bank also has 4 values that job seekers prioritize, they are: CSR, Learning & Development, Purpose & Mission, and Work-Life Balance. This company also focuses on Environmental Sustainability, Security, and the top 3 company values (Emphasis on Quality, Customer Focus, and Innovation).
Overall, despite 77.2% of companies reflecting at least one job seeker priority, there seems to be a gap between how companies speak about themselves online and what job seekers are looking for. 3 of the key job seeker priorities were some of the least common company values, and the top 3 company values are not a priority for job seekers.
