The only real good worker news recently has come out of Google. The company announced it was giving its entire global workforce of 23,000 a 10 percent pay raise starting in January.

Even though the search engine giant has had some layoffs during the recession, they are nothing like other large companies, and Google’s been hiring consistently through the bad times.

Clearly, lots of folks want to work for Google and companies like them. But how do you get on the Google job track?

With so many college kids graduating and finding no work, it makes sense for high school students and their parents, who are now scouting colleges, to wonder whether the school they pick will lead to a solid job for a solid employer.

But how do you find out whether the school you’re in is more likely to be a recruiting favorite of companies like Google? Social networking sites! There’s a wealth of information on these sites, particularly LinkedIn, that can shed light on this and I’m going to show you how to find it.

It turns out if you’re kid is going to Stanford University, she or he may have a leg up on other candidates who apply to Google. According to data I found on LinkedIn, about 4 percent of Google’s workforce have degrees from that school.

I was able to generate this graph from the endless amount of data LinkedIn has on professionals around the world.

Here are the directions for generating your own graphs for the companies your interested in, provided by LinkedIn’s Krista Canfield:

1. After signing in to LinkedIn, click on the “Companies” hyperlink at the top of the page
2. In the search box on the next page, type in the Company Name (ex. “Nike” or “Ferrari”) and hit the search button
3. You can either select the company name in the drop down as you begin typing it, or you should be taken to a page that has a listing of company names and you can pick the company who’s Company Profile you want to view
4. Now that you are the LinkedIn Company Page for that company, look on the right hand side. You should see, “Ferrari has xxx folowers” and below that “Follow Ferrari” then a module that says “How You’re Connected to Ferrari and right after that (before the ad slot) you should see a hyperlink that says, “Check out insightful statistics about Ferrari employees”
5. If you click that link, you should see the charts, graphs and statistics for that company. If you select the tab that says, “University Attended” you should get the page you’re looking for.

There’s a bunch of criteria you can search for, including the typical job functions workers have and who changed their job title recently. I particularly liked the data on how many years experience workers have at a particular company. This type of information can tell you whether a firm tends to have more younger or older workers.

Here’s Google’s make up:

Based on this chart, you could surmise that Google is on the younger side when it comes to who they recruit.

I’m thinking this data might be useful to more than just high school kids and their parents. It could give you an idea of what your chances are of getting a job if you’re 20 something or 50 something.

And I’m thinking such data may also be useful to the lawyer of the older Google employee, Brian Reid, who recently sued the company for age bias.