Extracting Job Title Hierarchy from Career Trajectories: A Bayesian Perspective

Extracting Job Title Hierarchy from Career Trajectories: A Bayesian Perspective

Huang Xu, Zhiwen Yu, Bin Guo, Mingfei Teng, Hui Xiong

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 3599-3605. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/500

A job title usually implies the responsibility and the rank of a job position. While traditional job title analysis has been focused on studying the responsibilities of job titles, this paper attempts to reveal the rank of job titles. Specifically, we propose to extract job title hierarchy from employees' career trajectories. Along this line, we first quantify the Difficulty of Promotion (DOP) from one job title to another by a monotonic transformation of the length of tenure based on the assumption that a longer tenure usually implies a greater difficulty to be promoted. Then, the difference of two job title ranks is defined as a mapping of the DOP observed from job transitions. A Gaussian Bayesian Network (GBN) is adopted to model the joint distribution of the job title ranks and the DOPs in a career trajectory. Furthermore, a stochastic algorithm is developed  for inferring the posterior job title rank by a given collection of DOPs in the GBN. Finally, experiments on more than 20 million job trajectories show that the job title hierarchy can be extracted precisely by the proposed method. 
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Data Mining
Machine Learning: Learning Preferences or Rankings
Uncertainty in AI: Bayesian Networks
Machine Learning Applications: Applications of Supervised Learning