Savvy workers today know there’s a lot more to a good job than the salary alone. Increasingly, employees (especially those on the younger side) are paying closer attention to what kinds of additional benefits employers offer. Three in five workers say their top priority when considering a job offer are benefits and perks, like free food, paid parental leave, and 401(k) match levels, according to Glassdoor.
Combing through more than 470,000 benefits reviews left by Glassdoor users, the firm looked at which eight industries received the highest quality rating for their benefits.
“This study shines a light on the quality of benefits in the workplace, which traditionally we have known very little about, and offers a first look into how satisfied employees are with the benefits packages at their workplace,” said Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist of Glassdoor.
It’s not all that hard to guess which industries’ benefits were ranked highest by workers: finance and technology. Finance beat out all eight industries in two of the three benefits Glassdoor analyzed (each industry was ranked on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest quality). On the opposite end of the ranking, restaurant and retail workers were least pleased with their benefits offerings.
Here’s how the rankings broke down according to three perks Glassdoor analyzed: free food, retirement benefits, and parental leave policies.
The industry with the highest quality benefits overall: Finance
The industry with the highest quality parental leave benefits: Finance
The industry with the highest quality retirement benefits: Finance
The industry with the best free food and snacks: Information Technology
There’s a reason finance and tech companies go out of their way to juice up their benefits packages. These are high-skilled jobs that have never been more in demand. There’s an all-out benefits war raging in Silicon Valley, and generous parental leave policies are just the beginning. We live in a time when workers at companies like Facebook can walk into work and get three square meals, sit for a haircut on their lunch break, tune up their bicycle, pick up their dry cleaning and get free laptop accessories from onsite vending machines. Of course, that may not always be the case. Some companies are finding that extreme perks (like rock climbing — yes, rock climbing ) aren’t as sustainable as benefits like parental leave.
