Google is the most popular company in the world — at least in that portion of the world made up of 120,000 final-year business and engineering students at leading universities in Europe, North America and Asia.

After all, who wouldn’t want to work at a company that promises former neurosurgeons and alligator wrestlers as colleagues, on-site massages, the chance to invent products that could be used by millions of people — and a free lunch?

The American search engine giant beat companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Goldman Sachs and Ernst & Young in the list of the top 50 employers that are most popular with business graduates — and it came out ahead of IBM, BMW and Intel in the equivalent list for engineering. Several businesses, including Microsoft (third and second in business and engineering, respectively), Sony and L’Oréal feature in the top 20 of both lists, which were compiled by Universum, an employer branding company.

Google will not say how many graduates it recruits each year, but it is unlikely to have enough capacity to employ all those that aspire to its coloured bean bags. Nonetheless, Alison Parrin, a career development programme manager at the company, describes graduates as a “critical pipeline” for its engineering and business teams around the world: “We look for exceptional technologists and business people and work hard to recruit creative, principled and hard working stars. We also place importance on ‘Googliness’, that extra-special achievement that makes you different.”

Anne Margrethe Mannerfelt, a market unit manager at Universum, was not surprised to see Google at the top. “It has a very strong consumer brand that is seen everywhere. It also has a corporate culture that . . . sits very well with the Generation Y lifestyle. It offers work-life balance, flexibility and the ability to be involved in really exciting projects right from the start.

“Companies like accounting and consultancy firms struggle a bit with this generation because it does not matter how much they say they offer work-life balance and flexibility, everyone knows that it’s difficult to achieve that within these companies.”

Yet accounting firms are still doing very well, given their size compared with others on the list. The financial services and investment banking industries are also doing better than expected amid the global downturn. Ms Mannerfelt attributes this to students’ interest in the sector and their willingness to keep up with employers’ performances by following the news.

Universum’s research also throws up regional variations. For example, graduates in Asia favour big multinationals, particularly in IT and other high-tech businesses, although public sector employment is also very popular everywhere in the region, barring India.

In Europe, national lists tend to be topped by big local brands — L’Oréal in France, Nokia in Finland, Ikea in Sweden and the BBC in the UK. “In Europe there is a bit more of a lean towards national champions than in Asia,” Ms Mannerfelt said. “The same goes in the US, although there they are mostly huge multinationals, anyway.”

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