Prospecting the career development of talents: A survival analysis perspective

The study of career development has become more important during a time of rising competition. Even with the help of newly available big data in the field of human resources, it is challenging to prospect the career development of talents in an effective manner, since the nature and structure of talent careers can change quickly. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel survival analysis approach to model the talent career paths, with a focus on two critical issues in talent management, namely turnover and career progression. Specifically, for modeling the talent turnover behaviors, we formulate the prediction of survival status at a sequence of time intervals as a multi-task learning problem by considering the prediction at each time interval as a task. Also, we impose the ranking constraints to model both censored and uncensored data, and capture the intrinsic properties exhibited in general lifetime modeling with non-recurrent and recurrent events. Similarly, for modeling the talent career progression, each task concerns the prediction of a relative occupational level at each time interval. The ranking constraints imposed on different occupational levels can help to reduce the prediction error. Finally, we evaluate our approach with several state-of-the-art baseline methods on real-world talent data. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models for predicting the turnover and career progression of talents.