Next time you’re on the job hunt, consider whether the companies to which you’re applying are publicly traded or privately held.

The difference between the two company types goes a long way in describing what kind of corporate culture you’ll encounter, not to mention the kinds of bonuses you’re likely to receive and how well delineated your career path is.

“There are defining differences in values and cultures that are palpable. You feel them across companies depending on whether they’re public or private,” said Paul Clifford, a senior consultant for the Hay Group, a global organizational consulting firm in Philadelphia.

You might prefer a company that treats workers like family, likelier at a private firm. Or maybe you’re more interested in a clear-cut career path, often better defined at a public company.

The main contrast, of course, is that private firms don’t have to fear the punch that can result from failing to meet investors’ expectations, and that can offer a measure of comfort to workers.

“There is a degree of insulation there that I’m sure a lot of people who work for private companies feel good about,” said John Endean, president of the American Business Conference, a Washington-based trade group for midsize public and private companies.

“You don’t have the immediate pressures of the capital markets determining what the company should look like, whether it should downsize,” he said.

Focus on profit

CB Richard Ellis’ move to become public last year was not the reason why Bob Palmer left his job as one of the commercial real estate company’s top brokers after 18 years on the job. But it certainly was a consideration in his decision to start his own company, The Palmer Team, he said.

At a public company, “there’s more of a focus on profit and loss than there is maybe on strategic things that you might spend money on that you don’t see a benefit for a couple of years,” said Palmer, in Sacramento, Calif.

“I’m not saying that a public company doesn’t spend money to make money, but you definitely have a different view of the world,” he said.

Of course, public companies offer benefits, too, not the least of which include stock grants and organizational stability.

“In a publicly traded company … there could be a more structured management team, a more structured career path for individuals,” said Kevin Knaul, executive vice president at Hudson, a global staffing and outsourcing firm. That’s a boon “for people who like to know exactly where they’re going in an organization,” he said.

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More structure

After working eight years at a privately-held firm, Knaul moved to Hudson, a division of Hudson Highland Group, three years ago.

“The benefits plan is much more structured at the publicly traded company. You know specifically what compensation is going to look like, how benefits are rolled out and specifically what those benefits are going to be,” Knaul said.

“At the privately held company, things were somewhat ambiguous,” Knaul said.

And public companies’ stock grants can be mighty alluring. Publicly traded Republic Bancorp, for instance, gave all its employees stock options last year, plus gave $10,000 bonuses to its customer-service representatives.

As companies are required to account for stock options on their balance sheets in coming months, some are likely to pull back on that benefit, but that doesn’t mean equity compensation is going away.

Private companies often focus on engendering a sense of loyalty among workers that publicly traded companies don’t always strive for with the same degree of enthusiasm.

“Privately owned companies, especially family businesses, tend toward a family environment for their employees, a sense of commitment to their employees and a sense that long-term tenure is a sign of success,” Clifford said.

That commitment may help explain why six of the top 10 companies on Fortune’s 100 Best Places to Work list are privately held, including Wegmans at No. 1 and W.L. Gore at No. 2.

The Fortune list, released in January, is largely based on employee surveys.

At Wegmans, a grocery chain, workers may know each other better than family: 20 percent of employees – about 6,000 people – boast job tenure of 10 years or more, and more than half the company’s store managers have worked there since they were teenagers, said spokeswoman Jo Natale, who’s been with the company for 19 years.

As well as paying $54 million over 20 years to help workers with college tuition, Wegmans provides in-depth training programs so workers can answer customers’ questions, and employees are given broad latitude in dealing with problems that arise on their turf.

All in the family

While you might encounter a more familial atmosphere at a private family-run shop, that also can have its downsides.

“That bloodline may be more important than your talent,” said Ed Pospesil, vice president at Bruner Consulting Associates and chairman of an online job forum, the Technology Executives Networking Group.

“If you happen to be the senior (information technology) executive in a closely held company and one of the children in the family graduates from college with an IT degree and is brought in as an understudy, you might want to dust off your resume,” he said.

“It takes a lot more patience sometimes to work in a firm like that. You may have family members who hold senior positions in the business but are there simply because they’re a member of the family,” he said.

Many public companies, on the other hand, have strict rules against nepotism.

Of course, it’s easy to make too much of the difference between public and private companies, and easy to find examples that contradict any generalizations.

For instance, the culture at Mars, the privately held candy maker employing some 30,000 people, is probably more like publicly traded Microsoft than your local dry cleaner.

And plenty of public companies are as committed to their employees as private firms. More than half the 100 companies on Fortune’s list are publicly traded.

“The difference between public and private … isn’t probably as significant for employees as the differences in industries would be,” said Robert Levering, co-founder of the Great Place to Work Institute, which compiles the Fortune list.

“From the employee viewpoint, it matters a lot more … whether you’re a retail clerk or an investment banker, rather than whether the company is privately held or publicly held,” he said.

‘No corporate nirvana’

For workers, the trick is finding a company, whether public or private, that suits their style.

“There is no corporate nirvana. There is no company without warts,” Pospesil said. “Everybody has to determine which set of warts they can accept. It comes down to ‘Do I want to do the work that has to be done here with this group of people?’ “

Does environmentalism turn you on, or maybe you’re seeking a workplace that’s willing to imbue the office with a religious ethic? You’re more likely to find private companies espousing a particular ideology.

“If you’re a public company reporting to shareholders on Wall Street, you can certainly stand up for principles and ideals, but you cannot give those nonmarket goals the kind of freer rein that you can with a private company,” said Endean, of the American Business Conference.

One example: Patagonia, the privately held apparel maker, based in Ventura, Calif., views its business decisions through a lens of environmentalism.

Being privately held “allows us to do things that are maybe environmentally friendly but not financially perfect,” said Jen Rapp, spokeswoman at Patagonia.

“In 1996 we switched our entire cotton line to organic cotton. This was a big financial hit for us initially. We had to lower our margins and raise prices,” she said.

But “eventually it all came back to us, because there was a big sportswear war in the late ’90s and it provided a great point of differentiation for us,” Rapp said.