On Analyzing Job Hop Behavior and Talent Flow Networks

Analyzing job hopping behavior is important for the understanding of job preference and career progression of working individuals. When analyzed at the workforce population level, job hop analysis helps to gain insights of talent flow and organization competition. Traditionally, surveys are conducted on job seekers and employers to study job behavior. While surveys are good at getting direct user input to specially designed questions, they are often not scalable and timely enough to cope with fast-changing job landscape. In this paper, we present a data science approach to analyze job hops performed by about 490,000 working professionals located in a city using their publicly shared profiles. We develop several metrics to measure how much work experience is needed to take up a job and how recent/established the job is, and then examine how these metrics correlate with the propensity of hopping. We also study how job hop behavior is related to job promotion/demotion. Finally, we perform network analyses at the job and organization levels in order to derive insights on talent flow as well as job and organizational competitiveness.