Career mobility forecasting and recommendation are important topics in talent management research. While existing models have extensively covered short-term, single-period recommendations and long-term, unconstrained career path suggestions, the user preference-constrained career path optimization problem remains underexplored. This paper addresses the common scenario where individuals have approximate career plans and seek to optimize their career trajectories by incorporating specific user preferences. We develop an exploration space-aware stochastic searching algorithm that incorporates a deep learning-guided searching space determination module and a position transit prediction module. We mathematically demonstrate its strengths in exploring optimal path solutions with fixed components predefined by users. Finally, we empirically validate the superiority of our method using a comprehensive real-world dataset, comparing it against state-of-the-art approaches.

Forecasting traffic flow is an important task in urban areas, and a large number of methods have been proposed for traffic flow prediction. However, most of the existing methods follow a general technical route to aggregate historical information spatially and temporally. In this paper, we propose a different approach for traffic flow prediction. Our major motivation is to more effectively incorporate various intrinsic patterns in real-world traffic flows, such as fixed spatial distributions, topological correlations, and temporal periodicity. Along this line, we propose a novel autoencoder-based traffic flow prediction method, named Spatio-Temporal AutoEncoder (ST-AE). The core of our method is an autoencoder specially designed to learn the intrinsic patterns from traffic flow data, and encode the current traffic flow information into a low-dimensional representation. The prediction is made by simply projecting the current hidden states to the future hidden states, and then reconstructing the future traffic flows with the trained autoencoder. We have conducted extensive experiments on four real-world data sets. Our method outperforms existing methods in several settings, particularly for long-term traffic flow prediction.

As a key decision-making process in compensation and benefits (C&B) in human resource management, job salary benchmarking (JSB) plays an indispensable role in attracting, motivating, and retaining talent. Whereas the existing research mainly focuses on revealing the essential impacts of personal and organizational characteristics and economic factors on labor costs (e.g., C&B), few studies target optimizing JSB from a practical, data-driven perspective. Traditional approaches suffer from issues that result from using small and sparse data as well as from the limitations of linear statistical models in practice. Furthermore, there are also important technical issues that need to be addressed in the small number of machine learning–based JSB approaches, such as “cold start” issues when considering a brand-new type of company or job or model interpretability issues. To this end, we propose to address the JSB problem with data-driven techniques from a fine-grained perspective by modeling large-scale, real-world online recruitment data. Specifically, we develop a nonparametric Dirichlet process–based latent factor model (NDP-JSB) to jointly model the latent representations of both company and job position and then apply the model to predict salaries based on company and position information. Our model strengthens the usage of data-driven approaches in JSB optimization by addressing the aforementioned issues in existing models. For evaluation, extensive experiments are conducted on two large-scale, real-world data sets. Our results validate the effectiveness of the NDP-JSB and demonstrate its strength in providing interpretable salary benchmarking to benefit complex decision-making processes in talent management. Summary of Contribution: This paper bridges the cutting-edge machine learning techniques to their implementation in a practical operation research problem in human resources. We focus on optimizing the salary-matching work to help the companies to seek reasonable salaries for their positions by proposing a data-driven approach to capture hidden patterns from user and company profiles. The contributions of this work reside in both operation research and computing. We (1) formulate the JSB optimization problem and (2) solve it by developing a data-driven method along with an effective algorithm optimization. Moreover, the proposed methodology has strengths in addressing the issues of data sparseness and result interpretability.

Recent years have witnessed the growing interests in investigating the competition among companies. Existing studies for company competitive analysis generally rely on subjective survey data and inferential analysis. Instead, in this paper, we aim to develop a new paradigm for studying the competition among companies through the analysis of talent flows. The rationale behind this is that the competition among companies usually leads to talent movement. Along this line, we first build a Talent Flow Network based on the large-scale job transition records of talents, and formulate the concept of “competitiveness” for companies with consideration of their bi-directional talent flows in the network. Then, we propose a Talent Flow Embedding (TFE) model to learn the bi-directional talent attractions of each company, which can be leveraged for measuring the pairwise competitive relationships between companies. Specifically, we employ the random-walk based model in original and transpose networks respectively to learn representations of companies by preserving their competitiveness. Furthermore, we design a multi-task strategy to refine the learning results from a fine-grained perspective, which can jointly embed multiple talent flow networks by assuming the features of company keep stable but take different roles in networks of different job positions. Finally, extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset clearly validate the effectiveness of our TFE model in terms of company competitive analysis and reveal some interesting rules of competition based on the derived insights on talent flows.

The understanding of job mobility can benefit talent management operations in a number of ways, such as talent recruitment, talent development, and talent retention. While there is extensive literature showing the predictability of the organization-level job mobility patterns (e.g., in terms of the employee turnover rate), there are no effective solutions for supporting the understanding of job mobility at an individual level. To this end, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical career-path-aware neural network for learning individual-level job mobility. Specifically, we aim at answering two questions related to individuals in their career paths: 1) who will be the next employer? 2) how long will the individual work in the new position? Specifically, our model exploits a hierarchical neural network structure with embedded attention mechanism for characterizing the internal and external job mobility. Also, it takes personal profile information into consideration in the learning process. Finally, the extensive results on real-world data show that the proposed model can lead to significant improvements in prediction accuracy for the two aforementioned prediction problems. Moreover, we show that the above two questions are well addressed by our model with a certain level of interpretability. For the case studies, we provide data-driven evidence showing interesting patterns associated with various factors (e.g., job duration, firm type, etc.) in the job mobility prediction process.

As a vital process to the success of an organization, salary benchmarking aims at identifying the right market rate for each job position. Traditional approaches for salary benchmarking heavily rely on the experiences from domain experts and limited market survey data, which have difficulties in handling the dynamic scenarios with the timely benchmarking requirement. To this end, in this paper, we propose a data-driven approach for intelligent salary benchmarking based on large-scale fine-grained online recruitment data. Specifically, we first construct a salary matrix based on the large-scale recruitment data and creatively formalize the salary benchmarking problem as a matrix completion task. Along this line, we develop a Holistic Salary Benchmarking Matrix Factorization (HSBMF) model for predicting the missing salary information in the salary matrix. Indeed, by integrating multiple confounding factors, such as company similarity, job similarity, and spatial-temporal similarity, HSBMF is able to provide a holistic and dynamic view for fine-grained salary benchmarking. Finally, extensive experiments on large-scale real-world data clearly validate the effectiveness of our approach for job salary benchmarking.