Employer Reputation

The results are based on the responses to a survey distributed to worldwide employers from a number of different sources:

• Previous Respondents
• Submitted contact lists from institutions (see Survey Nominations Procedure)
• Sign-ups on our sign-up facility (see Survey Nominations Procedure)
• Survey partners

The Survey

The survey is sent to many thousands of global employers each year. It has largely followed the same principles since inception, with some variation depending on career market themes of interest over time. At the beginning of the survey, employers state their field specialism and their regional familiarity.  We ask the following questions of each respondent:

Individual Characteristics

• Their name
• Their company/ organisation
• The nature (industry, etc.) and size of their organisation

Knowledge Specification

• Which country/territory they are most familiar with from an employer perspective. This will define the list of institutions from which the respondent can nominate domestically.
• Which region(s) they are most familiar with, from an employer perspective. Regional knowledge responses are grouped into three supersets that define the list of institutions from which the respondent can select when nominating internationally. These are Americas, APAC (Asia, Australia & New Zealand) and EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa).
• The specific subject areas * (any number) that they specialize in.
• The specific industry that they specialize in.
• Employers are asked to select the types of business programs they have or would consider recruiting talents from: MBA, Accountancy, Business Analytics, Entrepreneurship, EMBA, OMBA, Finance, HR, Marketing, Supply Chain or Other.

* Certain QS Subjects are not explicitly present in the survey form. This includes Geology, Geophysics and Petroleum Engineering. In such cases we derive their nominations and further transformations (see below) from the corresponding proxy field of study, which is available in the survey form: Geology and Geophysics are fully derived from Earth & Marine Sciences, while Petroleum Engineering is a weighted sum of Chemistry (5%), Environmental Sciences (5%), Earth & Marine Sciences (30%), Chemical Engineering (30%) and Electrical & Electronic Engineering (30%). 

Top Domestic Institutions

• Employers are asked to nominate up to 10 institutions that they rate as being the best for producing relevant graduates.

Top International Institutions

• Employers are asked to nominate up to 30 international institutions outside of their country/territory of knowledge that they rate as being the best for producing relevant graduates. Although the main list consists solely of institutions from the region(s) with which they express familiarity with, emoloyers are able to commend up to 30 institutions from other regions.

Additional Questions

Each year, the survey has additional questions that seek to answer a particular theme or need from the market, or to provide deeper insight into the nominations we receive. Past themes have included online learning, sustainability, and emerging skills. 

Business School Track

If an employer selects 'Business Masters' as one of the options for the question on hiring decisions, then the business school track of the employer survey commences, regardless of which subject is selected. The business school track then asks the following:

Top Business Schools

Employers are asked to select from an autocomplete list up to 10 business schools (either domestic or international) from which their company prefers to recruit international MBAs. Nominating a business school they graduated from is acceptable. The list consists of all business schools (both standalone and child schools), regardless of the region of knowledge selected in the main track of the survey. 

Further, we then ask respondents to select from a predefined list up to 3 business schools that they  believe create the most value for businesses and society in each region of their knowledge.

Data cleaning and validity checks

Once the survey has been collated, a variety of checks and balances are performed to ensure the responses are valid, useable and complete. For reasons of data integrity and to prevent attempts to game the process, we do not publish a comprehensive list of our checks and validations, in line with good data governance protocols. 

Step by Step Analysis

Once the responses have all been processed, we apply the following procedures for all of the employer nominations (with no breakdown by five broad faculty areas as is the case for Academic Reputation). 

1. Devise weightings based on the regional familiarity of respondents. This is done to balance the representation of three regional super sets (see above) in our surveys. Respondents are able to relate to more than one region. If a respondent commends an institution out of their regional familiarity, such a nomination is weighted lower (20% of a regular international nomination). 
2. Devise weightings based on the location with which respondents consider themselves familiar. Here we look at how many well enough recognized institutions in the location per response originated from it. In other words, we expect the volume of responses from a country to correlate with its international recognition. Locations with a low participation rate are exempted from this to avoid small number effects. 
3. Now, having regional and location weightings ready, we derive a weighted count of international nominations for each institution.  Here, we use a 5-year aggregation of nominations, where the earlier two years count for 25% and 50%, and the most recent three years at full 100% weight. 
4. Derive a weighted count of domestic nominations for each institution (excluding self-nominations).  This is adjusted against the number of institutions from that country with a certain level of international nominations and the total response from that country. Countries with more recognized institutions naturally face more competition in terms of gaining nominations, and this is designed to reflect and reward this. 
5. Normalize both domestic and international count to achieve a score out of 100.
6. Combine the two scores with with a relevant weights (see the table below).
7. Various transformation techniques applied to minimize the impact of outliers and scale the numbers to present a score out of 100 for the given faculty area.

In QS Subject Rankings, there is a risk that institutions with well-known strengths in a given discipline may be undervalued with respect to comprehensive institution with a strong overall employer reputation. This has led to a number of enhancements designed to better identify institutions with key strengths in a particular area, and to more effectively filter out the influence exerted by overall reputation on the discipline results.

• We look at the divergence between employer reputation in the specific subject (or broad subject area) and overall employer reputation. This means that the employer reputation scores of institutions that fare better in the specific discipline than overall are given a proportional boost, while those that fare worse have those shortfalls proportionally amplified. The result is that the key strengths of institutions shine brighter and less credit is attributed to overall reputation and strength in adjoining disciplines.
• Extra boost may be given to institutions identified as Specialists (see QS Institution Classification), if they offer academic programs in the relevant subject area (for QS Rankings by Subject) or faculty area (for QS Rankings by Faculty).
• Responses from employers seeking graduates from a specific discipline given additional weight 

Domestic and international nomination weights used in various rankings

* As a general principle, we expect the volume of responses from a country/territory to correlate with the number of institutions available in our ranking, and particularly the number of high-performing institutions (impact). If, however, an anomalous number of responses are showing from a country/territory that does not achieve this 'volume by impact' measure, we inspect the nominations more thoroughly. If the highest nominating country/territory is a neighbouring country/territory, which, in turn, provides more than 10% of all the international nominations received by that neighbour, we adjust these mutual nominations to the corresponding 'domestic' weight in the analysis.

In Business School Rankings, the analysis follows the same step by step procedure, with the following caveats: 

• regional weighting (step 1) is not applied 
• nominations originated from the autocomplete selection (see above) are weighted higher than from the predefined list 
• a nominated school receives extra points if any of the following conditions met:
  - an employer is from an industry that matches the specific rankings type (e.g. Finance & Banking industry matches QS Business Masters Rankings in Finance) 
  - an employer selected a type of business programs they have or would consider recruiting talents from that matches the specific rankings type
• standalone business schools receive a boost to combat a natural advantage child business schools have (due to a halo effect they get from their parent institution)
• if a business school or its parent institution (if any) was nominated in the main track of the survey in one of the business-related subject areas, then the business school is rewarded additionally, to reflect its broader brand awareness

Mapping between subject areas available for selection in the QS Employer Survey and QS Global MBA Rankings (MBA); QS Business Masters Rankings: Masters in Management (MIM), Masters in Finance (MIF), Masters in Business Analytics (MSB), Masters in Marketing (MMK), Masters in Supply Chain Management (MSM); QS Online MBA Rankings (OMBA); QS Executive MBA Rankings (EMBA)