Employee Turnover Prediction: A Deep Survival Analysis Approach

Employee turnover refers to an individual’s termination of employment from the current organization. It is one of the most persistent challenges for firms, especially those ones in Information Technology (IT) industry that confront high turnover rates. Successfully predicting which employees may terminate their employment benefits multiple stakeholders such as firms and online recruiters. Prior studies have focused on either the turnover prediction within a single firm or the aggregated employee movement among firms. How to predict the individual employees’ turnovers among multiple firms has gained little attention in the literature, and thus remains a great research challenge. By collecting and utilizing a unique of career dataset, in this study we propose a novel deep survival analysis approach to predict the turnovers of individual employees across different firms. With extensive experimental evaluations with a real-world dataset, we demonstrate the superior performance of our method over several benchmark methods, and further estimate the cost saving for recruiters by using our turnover prediction solution to showcase its practical business value.