Identifying Positions Having High Turnover Rates within Common Career Paths

This paper studies the specific connection between job position and turnover rate based on the database scraped from Linkedin from public profiles of audit companies “big 4”, the cases are from 1980 to 2020 years, the database contains more than 2000 user profiles, including at least current and two previous positions for each of the employees, and the focus country of the research is Russia. To confirm or refute hypothesis, an unsupervised clustering analysis method was chosen. The empirical research shows quite clear indicators of low turnover rates for specific positions, namely Managers and Partners, within KPMG. Also, a similar observation was identified when analyzing PwC profiles where Directors positions showed low turnover rates, while the same Director position at EY showed relatively high turnover rates. The result revealed that there was a significant problem of high turnover rates identified in EY across different job titles and positions within the firm in Russia. The other firms; namely Deloitte, KPMG and PwC, are doing a much better job at retaining their employees vertically across different job stages. Based on the findings, the given recommendations to companies can solve problems that HR specialists might face in order to retain the employee. The results open up prospects for us for the future discussion to explore further analysis and deeper breakdown of different positions within a firm by analyzing more profile fields, and possibly running some text analytics on user profiles, in order to better profile accounting firms employees and suggest actionable decisions to reduce turnover rate and improve employee retention within those firms. Key words: high turnover rates, common career path, audit