1. Using Social Network Activity Data to Identify and Target Job Seekers
- Author
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Efing, Matthias, Hau, Harald, Kampkktter, Patrick, Rochet, Jean-Charles, Ebbes, Peter, Netzer, Oded, Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC Paris), Groupe de recherche en économie mathématique et quantitative (GREMAQ), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)-Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA)-Université Toulouse 1 Capitole (UT1), Université Fédérale Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées-Université Fédérale Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées, and HEC Research Paper Series
- Subjects
Leverage (finance) ,Computer science ,Strategy and Management ,JEL: J - Labor and Demographic Economics/J.J4 - Particular Labor Markets ,Management Science and Operations Research ,Business model ,Seekers ,Customer analytics ,0502 economics and business ,Customer Analytics ,050207 economics ,Hidden Markov model ,Hidden Markov Models ,Bayes estimator ,Targeting ,050208 finance ,Data collection ,Social network ,ComputingMilieux_THECOMPUTINGPROFESSION ,business.industry ,05 social sciences ,Sensor fusion ,Data science ,Purchasing ,Data Fusion ,JEL: M - Business Administration and Business Economics • Marketing • Accounting • Personnel Economics/M.M3 - Marketing and Advertising ,JEL: C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods/C.C1 - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General ,JEL: J - Labor and Demographic Economics/J.J2 - Demand and Supply of Labor ,[SHS.GESTION]Humanities and Social Sciences/Business administration ,050211 marketing ,business - Abstract
An important challenge for many firms is to identify the life transitions of its customers, such as job searching, expecting a child, or purchasing a home. Inferring such transitions, which are generally unobserved to the firm, can offer the firms opportunities to be more relevant to their customers. In this paper, we demonstrate how a social network platform can leverage its longitudinal user data to identify which of its users are likely to be job seekers. Identifying job seekers is at the heart of the business model of professional social network platforms. Our proposed approach builds on the hidden Markov model (HMM) framework to recover the latent state of job search from noisy signals obtained from social network activity data. Specifically, we use the latent states of the HMM to fuse cross-sectional survey responses to a job-seeking status question with longitudinal user activity data, resulting in a partially HMM. Thus, in some time periods, and for some users, we observe a direct measure of the true job-seeking status. We demonstrate that the proposed model can predict not only which users are likely to be job seeking at any point in time but also what activities on the platform are associated with job search and how long the users have been job seeking. Furthermore, we find that targeting job seekers based on our proposed approach can lead to a 29% increase in profits of a targeting campaign relative to the approach that was used by the social network platform. This paper was accepted by Juanjuan Zhang, marketing.
- Published
- 2018