Panacea: Visual exploration system for analyzing trends in annual recruitment using time-varying graphs

PLoS One. 2021 Mar 1;16(3):e0247587. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0247587. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Annual recruitment data of new graduates are manually analyzed by human resources (HR) specialists in industries, which signifies the need to evaluate the recruitment strategy of HR specialists. Different job seekers send applications to companies every year. The relationships between applicants' attributes (e.g., English skill or academic credentials) can be used to analyze the changes in recruitment trends across multiple years. However, most attributes are unnormalized and thus require thorough preprocessing. Such unnormalized data hinder effective comparison of the relationship between applicants in the early stage of data analysis. Thus, a visual exploration system is highly needed to gain insight from the overview of the relationship among applicant qualifications across multiple years. In this study, we propose the Polarizing Attributes for Network Analysis of Correlation on Entities Association (Panacea) visualization system. The proposed system integrates a time-varying graph model and dynamic graph visualization for heterogeneous tabular data. Using this system, HR specialists can interactively inspect the relationships between two attributes of prospective employees across multiple years. Further, we demonstrate the usability of Panacea with representative examples for finding hidden trends in real-world datasets, and we discuss feedback from HR specialists obtained throughout Panacea's development. The proposed Panacea system enables HR specialists to visually explore the annual recruitment of new graduates.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Data Visualization*
  • Education, Graduate
  • Humans
  • Japan
  • Job Application*
  • Personnel Selection / trends*
  • Specialization*
  • Universities
  • Workforce / organization & administration*

Grants and funding

This study was funded by Panasonic Corporation. The funder provided support in the form of salaries for all the authors, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of the authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.