Employee Attrition: What Makes an Employee Quit?

Authors

Alex Frye, Southern Methodist UniversityFollow
Christopher Boomhower, Southern Methodist UniversityFollow
Michael Smith, Southern Methodist UniversityFollow
Lindsay Vitovsky, Southern Methodist UniversityFollow
Stacey Fabricant, Penn Mutual Life Insurance CompanyFollow

Abstract

Albeit to varying degrees, employee attrition is a costly challenge faced by many employers \cite{kantor}. In this paper, we present a model for predicting employee attrition, as well as discuss the serious ethical implications of using such a model within organizations. To accomplish this, we examined publicly available data from the Office of Personnel Management, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and IBM. With these sources, we determined a set of statistically significant factors that correlate to an employee’s decision to quit, and determined to which types of occupations our model may be applied. After applying Principal Component Analysis and classification methods K-Nearest Neighbors and Random Forest, it was Logistic Regression that allowed us to simplify the model and predict employee quits with the highest accuracy of our testing methods, achieving a greater than seventy-four percent success rate.

Recommended Citation

Frye, Alex; Boomhower, Christopher; Smith, Michael; Vitovsky, Lindsay; and Fabricant, Stacey (2018) "Employee Attrition: What Makes an Employee Quit?," SMU Data Science Review: Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 9.
Available at: https://scholar.smu.edu/datasciencereview/vol1/iss1/9

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License