--- title: How Great Employer Brands Can Hide Terrible Jobs description: Breaking news and analysis from time.com. Politics, world news, photos, video, tech reviews, health, science, and entertainment news. canonical: https://time.com/partner-content/-partner-name-/how-great-employer-brands-can-hide-terrible-jobs/ author: Jena McGregor article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2026-07-26T10:30:00.458Z article:modified_time: 2026-07-24T23:31:06.237Z article:section: Charter og:title: How Great Employer Brands Can Hide Terrible Jobs og:description: Breaking news and analysis from time.com. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. by [Jena McGregor](https://time.com/author/jena-mcgregor/) Managing Editor, Charter Jul 26, 2026 10:30 AM UTC  Art: Charter by [Jena McGregor](https://time.com/author/jena-mcgregor/) Managing Editor, Charter Jul 26, 2026 10:30 AM UTC Companies spend a lot of time focusing on their employer brand—getting onto “best places to work” lists, worrying about Glassdoor rankings, touting benefits on their web sites. But as workers have long known, what makes a job great depends not just on perks or the employer’s brand, but on individual teams, leaders, and where their job sits in the organization. A new analysis puts hard data behind that idea. The research organization [Burning Glass Institute](https://www.burningglassinstitute.org/) recently released a follow-up to their annual “Where You Work Matters” [report](https://www.whereyouworkmatters.org/methodology/), which rates 1,750 companies on how well they’re paying, advancing, and retaining employees based on millions of job postings, LinkedIn profiles, and pay reports—rather than self-reported surveys. The [new research](https://www.burningglassinstitute.org/research/goodcompanywrongjob) goes a step further, exploring how widely worker experience can vary even within the same firm. For instance, the report finds that at American Express, pay, retention, and promotion opportunities for lending officers rank high compared to other firms (at the 78th, 91st and 99th percentile, respectively), while the same ratings for software engineers (at the 43rd, 31st, and 27th percentile) trail other firms. Charter spoke with Burning Glass’s president, [Matt Sigelman](http://linkedin.com/in/mattsigelman/?skipRedirect=true), about the myth of a uniformly “great place to work,” what consistency says about a company’s culture, and what their data say about AI and jobs. Here are excerpts from our conversation, edited for length and clarity: Sign up for Charter's newsletter to get the handbook for the future of work delivered to your inbox. Email Address You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our [Terms of Service](https://www.charterworks.com/terms-of-service/) and [Privacy Policy](https://www.charterworks.com/privacy-policy/). **What did this follow-up analysis find that the initial research didn’t?** Fundamentally what this gets at is the incompleteness of the vocabulary we've evolved around ‘good jobs’ and ‘good companies.’ In the policy world, there's a whole chorus of voices who define good jobs as being a construct of wages and benefits. There's a whole industry of people who have been focused on defining ‘best places to work.’ Both of those endeavors are worthy, but the averages mask a lot of variation. Even companies that generate a lot of opportunity for their employees have sand traps. If you compare each job against the same job at other firms, the average firm has at least one job that's in the 90th percentile or above compared to its peers, and some jobs that are below the 10th percentile. **What does that tell you?** One of the things we came to appreciate here is that consistency is undervalued as an employer quality measure. That's important because what that consistency reflects is not just intent, but practice and process. Ultimately, when we see big spreads across companies…what we're really seeing is that different parts of the company have different leaders and different leaders are setting different cultures. Companies like John Deere—where there's a much tighter spread and much more consistency \[every measured role falls between the 68th and 99th percentile\]—have clearly engineered a set of people practices which are embedded into the way the company does business. This isn't just about the specific priorities of individual leaders. It becomes key to how work gets done. **You found that higher rated jobs tend to follow strategy. At tech companies, those might be software engineering jobs. If jobs are seen as overhead, there may be fewer promotions. Some might argue that would be the right talent strategy for some firms…** There's no one-size-fits-all to a company's people practices. One of the reasons we break out different metrics of pay, promotion, and retention is that different companies have different priorities. The key question here is whether employers are making those decisions intentionally—or whether they're happening by default. One of the data points that stood out for me in the analysis was of food preparers at Whole Foods. At most stores, food preparation is not a role that's treated as being a launch point to onward career mobility. But at Whole Foods, that role is at the center of their strategy. Where is Whole Foods making their margins? It’s not on the 365 brand toilet paper. They're making their margins on the prepared food aisle. For them, it makes sense to make sure that it's a great role with great promotion opportunities in a way that may not be so central to other chains. If you're a firm that's struggling with talent shortages and you see that many of your roles have no pathway, that should raise questions around whether you could actually do more building from within in order to address your shortages…Having role-by-role insight provides a diagnostic for where policies are translating into practice. **You have a particularly broad view into employment data at Burning Glass**. **What do you make of the ongoing debate on AI and its impact on jobs?** I’ll give you a hint of two things we're seeing that we're \[researching\] more right now. Both speak to how we're getting the debate wrong. One is that a lot of the terms of discussion have been driven by people like you and me who have college degrees and are anxious about how AI is going to take our job security away. That may happen, but the reality is what we're seeing right now is the jobs that really do seem to be going away are less professional jobs \[and more\] administrative, clerical, and customer service jobs. The biggest impacts may not be to the college-educated, but to the kinds of jobs that have provided good access to the middle class for people who don't have degrees. Number two: We're getting this wrong because—in our anxiety over body counts and all the one-upsmanship of organizations coming up with stunning tallies of how many people will lose their jobs—what we're forgetting is that new technologies more often change _how_ you work than _whether_ you work. \[The\] big changes in professional jobs is in how the work is getting defined, what skills you need, and what level of experience you need—far more than jobs going away. **What’s next:** **Burning Glass this fall plans to release a tool for workers to benchmark their situation—including their compensation and career mobility—against their peers.** ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/partner-content/-partner-name-/how-great-employer-brands-can-hide-terrible-jobs/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/partner-content/-partner-name-/how-great-employer-brands-can-hide-terrible-jobs/"},"headline":"How Great Employer Brands Can Hide Terrible Jobs","datePublished":"2026-07-26T10:30:00.458Z","dateModified":"2026-07-24T23:31:06.237Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/partner-content/-partner-name-/how-great-employer-brands-can-hide-terrible-jobs/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta82ffc413136ce81/6a63f54ab1717d6f334d3a05/charter-sigelman.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jena McGregor","jobTitle":"Managing Editor, Charter","url":"https://time.com/author/jena-mcgregor/"}],"articleSection":"Charter","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta82ffc413136ce81/6a63f54ab1717d6f334d3a05/charter-sigelman.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"charter-sigelman.jpg","caption":"","creditText":"Art: Charter","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/partner-content/-partner-name-/how-great-employer-brands-can-hide-terrible-jobs/","name":"How Great Employer Brands Can Hide Terrible Jobs"}}]}] ```