Large-Scale Talent Flow Embedding for Company Competitive Analysis

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.