With a few notable exceptions, people are generally more interested in telling you where they are heading (city, a state or even coast), than the company they are going to work for. It’s true that company often correlates with location, but as banks, tech firms, & diversifieds continue to expand to new geographies, that’s not always the case. So we’ve taken a non-geographical approach with this chart, and focused exclusively how often the 50 largest US companies were identified by 14,000 of the top-performing high-school and college-aged millennials in the United States as places where they might want to work. The data was sourced from the 2017 and 2018 Career Interest Surveys published by the NSHSS.

The data paints an anxiety-inducing picture for today’s corporate titans. Of the S&P top 50 corporations, only three companies (Amazon, 3M and IBM) were more desirable in 2018 than they were in 2017. The remainder were either static, had slipped in the rankings, or had been too small to count under the 2017 methodology. Most importantly (if I were head of HR for a large American company), fourteen S&P 50 companies did not receive even a single vote out of the total 43,000 cast (14.3k students x 3 votes).

There are numerous companies that were not big enough to qualify or not publicly listed (like the number one spot, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital). This also tells us that — with the exception of a few famous brands — kids are thinking about jobs the same way they are thinking about a lot of things today: with a preference for a unique and fulfilling experience over the safe and staid.

Chart copyright 2018 Walletwyse.com. Reproduction permitted with attribution.