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Good Company, Wrong Job

Why a Brand is No Guarantee

By:
 
Matt Sigelman
Matt Sigelman
 
Shrinidhi Rao
Shrinidhi Rao
 
Luke Chen
Luke Chen
 
Gwynn Guilford
Gwynn Guilford
 
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
 
Marie Groark
Marie Groark
July 2026
Good Company, Wrong Job

A respected employer brand has long served as shorthand for a good job. But drawing on the career histories of 12 million workers across 1,750 of America's largest employers, this report finds that the promise of the brand does not always hold evenly across a company. On average, an 81-percentile-point gap separates the best- and worst-performing roles inside the same firm — one department a fast track to promotions and pay, another a near-total dead end. The lesson for workers, counselors, and the AI-powered tools guiding them: opportunity is decided less by the logo on the door than by which door inside the building you walk through — and it's more widely distributed than "best places to work" lists suggest.

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