Comcast ranks 10th in U.S. for job seekers on LinkedIn

So much for all those disgruntled Comcast Corp. cable customers.

More than a million people applied for jobs at Comcast in 2016.

Now, LinkedIn says jobs at the Philadelphia company are some of the most-desired in the nation, based on the online clicks of millions of LinkedIn members.

Comcast ranked 10th as a top employer, says LinkedIn, a social media service for job seekers. Alphabet, parent of Google, ranked first, followed by Amazon, Facebook, Salesforce, Uber, Tesla, Apple, Time Warner, and the Walt Disney Co. All 50 LinkedIn-ranked companies can be found here.  The rankings were based on interest in a company's jobs, brand, employees, and employee retention.

Comcast didn't even make it onto LinkedIn's desired-jobs survey last year — the website's first.

But Dan Roth, LinkedIn's editor-in-chief, noted one big change in this year's methodology: The social-media platform also considered online activity involving corporate subsidiaries.

Roth wouldn't be more specific. But last year, LinkedIn tracked only members' clicks connected with the Comcast cable division. This year, LinkedIn looked at the behavior for cable and NBCUniversal, the entertainment conglomerate that Comcast acquired in 2011.

"In an era when people are changing jobs all the time, professionals are collecting experiences, and they want to go to places that are tackling hard or big problems," Roth said. Prospective employees may "have heard rumors about what it's like to work at some of these companies," he added. "But how long will you be there? You get what you can out of it."

Comcast has a cable-division effort underway to boost its long-dismal customer-satisfaction ratings. It's also developing new streaming products and launching a wireless phone service.

LinkedIn normalized the online behavior for companies of different sizes. Comcast has 160,000 employees, while many companies on the LinkedIn list had only a few thousand. It tracked how many people were researching jobs at specific companies and applying for jobs there. LinkedIn also looked at people who were networking to contact employees of specific companies — or someone with whom they could network and help them get a job, Roth said.

Job seekers did not seem turned off by negative publicity at a company. "Even though Uber is getting beaten up," Roth said, "people are still applying there in incredible numbers."

Comcast's head of human resources, William Strahan, said Friday: "We are thrilled to be among such great companies on LinkedIn's list. Our recruiting teams are amazed with the variety of people who want to work for us. This is great for Comcast and NBCUniversal and great for Philadelphia."