The 50 Best Places to Work

Management consulting firms Bain & Co. and McKinsey & Co. topped Glassdoor's annual list of the 50 Best Places to Work, a ranking created entirely from employee reviews.

"If you go and read the reviews, what employees tell you is the reason they like these management consulting firms, Bain and McKinsey, is that they get to work with some of the best people they'll ever work with in their entire life, incredibly smart people, they get to work on very diverse projects, they get to travel the world, and they get accelerated learning on a scale that they're unlikely to get again in their career," says Robert Hohman, CEO and cofounder of Glassdoor, a website where employees rate their companies.

Following Bain and McKinsey, which ranked first and second, respectively, were last year's winner Facebook, nonprofit information technology firm MITRE, and Google.

Of the companies that made both the 2011 and 2012 lists, McKinsey ranked as the "most improved." "McKinsey, in particular, has done a good job making it a great place to work for a lifetime," Hohman says.

Seventeen companies debuted on the 2012 list, including J. Crew, Starbucks, and Disney Parks & Resorts. Among the biggest decliners was Southwest Airlines, which dropped 15 spots and landed at No. 17.

A surprise on Glassdoor's list was daily deals website Groupon, which ranked No. 40. Hohman says Groupon can be a polarizing work environment, but some employees enjoy working for the Chicago-based company -- enough for it to make Glassdoor's list. "Here's the interesting thing about Groupon, if you read the reviews. Groupon is a really intense place. They're growing tremendously fast. Change is just a matter of course, every day. This a perfect example of where if you're a good fit for that environment, you do extremely well. ... If you don't like that much change, you will really not like working at Groupon."

To compile the list, Glassdoor used information collected from an anonymous 20-question survey that addresses eight workplace factors, including work-life balance, career opportunities, communication, compensation and benefits, fairness and respect, employee morale, recognition and feedback, and senior leadership. To make the list, companies had to have a minimum CEO rating, a minimum rating in all eight categories, and at least 25 current employee-submitted reviews over the past 12 months.

"It's really like the Employees' Choice awards for companies," Hohman says. "Employees themselves told us what's great about their companies, how they feel about their leadership and CEOs, and then we collected that information over the last 12 months. And these are the 50 best out of 65,000 companies that we looked at."

Here's the complete list of Glassdoor's 50 Best Places to Work for 2012:

1. Bain & Co.
2. McKinsey & Co.
3. Facebook
4. MITRE
5. Google
6. CareerBuilder
7. Slalom Consulting
8. REI
9. Trader Joe's
10. Apple
11. General Mills
12. Rackspace
13. Salesforce.com
14. United Space Alliance
15. Dow Chemical
16. Chevron
17. Southwest Airlines
18. National Instruments
19. Wayfair
20. Citrix Systems
21. QUALCOMM
22. SAP America
23. Costco Worldwide
24. J. Crew
25. Procter & Gamble
26. Fluor
27. Reachlocal
28. Johnson & Johnson
29. Monsanto Co.
30. NetApp
31. Morningstar
32. Intel Corp.
33. Disney Parks & Resorts
34. Starbucks
35. NIKE
36. Cleveland Clinic
37. Coach
38. Ernst & Young
39. Sephora USA
40. Groupon
41. Goldman Sachs
42. Intuit
43. Accenture
44. Nordstrom
45. PricewaterhouseCoopers
46. Eli Lilly
47. MTV Networks
48. Scottrade
49. NVIDIA
50. FedEx

This story comes from U.S. News & World Report.

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