Does brand have an influence on employment choice?

What do you want to do with the experience and the brand?

The brand helps if and when you quit the job to get easier recognition (no need to explain what you used to do if you have a McKinsey&Co, GE, P&G, Goldman, etc. on your resume), and could help to get you head-hunted above certain job levels.

The brand, however, typically comes at a "price". The "price" varies by industry and even company, but look out for the following:

a) Worse odds of getting the job (aka more competition).
b) In connection with (a) worse odds of becoming a senior manager one day.
c) Less senior starting job.
d) Longer hours and/or less pay.

L.

I'm training to be a career fellow next year, and last week we went over some basics on the in-country job search for int'ls. The trainer's advice? Look for companies that aren't super well-known. With visas the way they are, there is a ton of competition for companies that sponsor international students. This means you might be better off approaching companies that sponsor, but aren't in the limelight.

What does this have to do with our conversation? I guess that it is highly personal, and there are sometimes outside constraints.

There's a difference between brand strength of a product and brand strength of certain work experiences. For example, I just saw a show on the History Channel that said McDonald's is the most recognized brand in the world. That does not mean, of course, that work experience at McDonald's is the most respected in the world. Same goes for many other big brands. Saying you work at Nokia, Coke, or even Gucci or Mercedes Benz really has little bearing on how well respected working at the company would be.

There are companies, however, where work experience is (nearly) universally respected. Is McKinsey & Co. one of the top brands around the world? No, but within the business community, and for any jobs you hope to get in the future almost anywhere around the world, the name is gold. Same applies to the other Big 3 consulting, a handful of the big investment banks, a few CPG and tech companies and a few others. Recruiters respect these experiences because they know how intense the competition is to land a job at Google or Goldman. There's some crossover between product brand and work experience brand - for example I think marketing experience at Coke would be quite valuable down the road; but there's not a direct correlation between brand respect and work experience respect. I'm sure Ford and Wal-Mart are among the most well known brands in the world, but...

We've all heard the statistics that most people these days will change jobs 10 or 15 times over the course of their careers. If that's the case, there is definitely value to having one of those well known universally respected brands somewhere on the old resume. As Lepium pointed out, it can make a difference in certain recruiting situations. I'm thinking there are maybe 10 companies, give or take, that have this type of impact on the resume, and not surprisingly, positions at these companies are among the most sought after (among big companies). They might be McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman, Morgan, Lehman, perhaps Citi (even with their recent troubles), GE, P&G, Google, perhaps Microsoft, and maybe a couple of others that aren't popping to mind right now.

Yes very true pelihu.

On top of that i would also say, outside of the finance and MC brands, service and product based brand value in terms of employment differs depending on which region the individual is targetting. e.g. Baidu is currently a very sought after company in the Chinese speaking world. Likewise, I would venture that Yahoo is probably more popular than Google in Japan, mostly because the Japanese use Yahoo services more widely than google services.

Whereas ebay? They failed miserably in Japan, so not many people would consider them for employment here (Yahoo Auction is the main online auction tool used in Japan).

I assume work experience respect, would also depend on what role you held. If you was in front line administration for a high brand company (e.g mail room) even in companies such as Goldman etc.

I am in the Real Estate industry and I would say that brand had a big impact on the employers I sought out. However, I do agree with pelihu that just because a company has a great brand name doesn't mean it will open doors for you.