Talent Board, a non-profit organization focused on the elevation and promotion of a quality candidate experience through its annual recruiting and hiring industry benchmark research, today announced a new research project that will review the candidate experiences of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies To Work For to determine how fair and positive these experiences are.

The “100 Best Companies To Work For” and “Great Place To Work” are proud designations that thousands of companies strive to earn and hold onto every year. They are based on a rigorous employee experience methodology that evaluates and certifies thousands of organizations in America’s largest ongoing annual workforce study. The question Talent Board wants to answer with this new research project is, do the 100 Best Companies To Work For also deliver fair and positive candidate experiences?

“We hypothesize that the 100 Best Companies should deliver a great candidate experience, but as far as we know, no one has ever actually reviewed this,” said Kevin Grossman, Talent Board president. “When you do the math, we’re talking about millions of varying experiences because literally millions of candidates compete for jobs at these companies, including current employees these companies are struggling to retain these days. Based on what drives a positive candidate experience that we see every year in our benchmark research, we really want to know if the candidate experience at these companies is positive and fair, or not. We know that even when it is positive, it’s not easy for employers to sustain over time.”

For 11 years Talent Board has been measuring the candidate experience at companies big and small across industries. They’ve worked with over 1,200 companies and have surveyed over 1.25 million candidates to date. Each year they give awards to companies with above-average candidate experience ratings, and only 14 companies out of the 2022 100 Best Companies to Work For, including Accenture, Capital One, Hilton, West Monroe, and others have won Talent Board CandE Awards to date.

Once Talent Board completes their candidate experience review of the 100 Best Companies to Work For, they’ll rank the companies by research and application stages and write up their overall takeaways. They plan to release this report in conjunction with their 2022 Talent Board CandE Winner announcement in mid-September.

Employers interested in participating in Talent Board’s 2022 Candidate Experience Benchmark Research Program can learn more about it here.