Fortune 500 companies are the highest-revenue companies in the country, and combined, employ around 30 million people worldwide. As such a large part of the economy and some of the largest employers in the U.S., Fortune 500 companies also provide a sizeable share of the country’s job opportunities.

In this analysis, we utilize job postings from Fortune 500s accessed via the NLx Research Hub to explore their job opportunities. Our data includes over 5.5 million job postings from 2023, representing 460 of the Fortune 500s. We find that most Fortune 500 job opportunities in 2023 were not in stereotypical finance or tech positions. The most common Fortune 500 job opportunities were (1) for companies in the retail and food/drink industries, (2) in sales occupations, and (3) most prevalent in southern states. Additional pieces in this Fortune 500 series will delve further into these job opportunities.

• Retail and food/drink Fortune 500 companies combined only make up a fifth (19%) of the Fortune 500 list but provided almost half of the job opportunities in 2023.

• Fortune 500 companies in the retail industry provided nearly a quarter (24%) of all Fortune 500 job opportunities.

• Fortune 500 companies in the food/drink industry provided just over a fifth (21%) of all Fortune 500 job opportunities .

Almost Half of Fortune 500 Job Opportunities Were from Retail or Food/Drink Companies

The Fortune 500s with the Most Job Opportunities Were Commonly in the Retail or Food/Drink Industries

• Large corporations such as Walmart, Lowe’s, and Home Depot accounted for the high volume of job opportunities in the retail industry even though there were only 53 retail Fortune 500s represented in the data.*

• Similarly, big chain restaurant conglomerates, such as Yum China (parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell) accounted for the high volume of job opportunities in the food/drink industry even though there were only 35 such companies in the data.*

• Sales job opportunities were the most common, making up over a fifth (21%) of Fortune 500 job opportunities in 2023. Many of these sales positions were for retail salespersons, cashiers, and their supervisors.

• Despite Fortune 500s in the food/drink industry making up a quarter of the job opportunities, only about a tenth (9%) of Fortune 500 job opportunities were in food preparation and serving occupations, meaning that those food/drink companies had openings for many other occupations as well.

The Most Common Fortune 500 Job Opportunities Were in Sales and Related Occupations

The Majority of Fortune 500 Job Opportunities Were for Low Paying Occupations

• Over half (56%) of Fortune 500 job opportunities were for below-average paying occupations, defined as those with average wages for the occupation below the average wage across all occupations.

• These findings were driven largely by sales, food preparation and serving, and transportation and moving occupations, where the job opportunities were almost entirely for below-average paying occupations (84% of sales opportunities and 100% of food prep and transportation and moving opportunities were in below-average paying occupations).

Fortune 500 Job Opportunities Were More Common in Southern States

Sales Were the Most Common Fortune 500 Job Opportunities in the Majority of States

Process

The data included in this analysis are made up of 2023 NLx job postings compiled from the job history table files available via the NLx Research Hub. Due to inconsistencies in employer information in the original NLx microdata, we did keyword searches to identify job postings for Fortune 500 companies. In certain places, we included subsidiaries where the subsidiary company is closely related to the parent company or the parent company is merely a holding (e.g., Yum China job postings included postings from its main brands of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell). Where available, FEINs in the NLx data were compared with FEINs for the company via online EIN look-up tools to confirm. However, particularly for large corporations like Fortune 500s, FEINs are not often one-to-one with company names.

After the Fortune 500 job postings were identified in the 2023 data, we then dropped “ghost job” postings (i.e., postings where the original job opportunity was associated with multiple locations and therefore had “ghost” postings for each location in addition to the base posting for purposes of job feeds). Analyses were conducted at both the company and job posting levels. We also incorporated external data on average pay by occupation obtained from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Occupation Employment and Wage Statistics tables and merged it with individual job postings. We used the BLS data to flag occupations as low paying if the average wage for the occupation was below the average wage across all occupations.

Sample

We found job postings affiliated with 460 out of the 500 Fortune 500 companies in the 2023 NLx data, resulting in over 5.5 million job postings. Representation in the NLx was mostly consistent across industry, with over 85 percent coverage of companies in each industry (see table below). However, because NLx data collection relies in part on partnerships with employers, there is variation in how consistently companies include their jobs in the NLx. Some companies have full or near to full coverage of their job postings whereas other companies might include job postings in the NLx on more of an ad hoc basis. We identified about a quarter (126) of the 460 Fortune 500 companies in the NLx that likely do not have complete and consistent coverage of their job postings. Companies were manually reviewed and flagged for likely incomplete coverage based on factors such as low number of job postings, high employee-job postings ratios, and job posting sources.