Automated Employee Objective Matching Using Pre-trained Word Embeddings

Employee performance objectives are recurrent short-term goals established between an organization and its employees. These objectives are typically aligned with the strategic goals of the company. Human Resources professionals are responsible for supporting employees in achieving their objectives, which in turn mediates enterprise success. One form of such support is grouping employees who have similar objectives in teams so that they can cooperate with one another. This process becomes difficult in large organizations with thousands of employees.In this paper, we present a system to assist Human Resources professionals in finding employees having similar objectives. The system automates the process of matching employees based on their common objectives using pre-trained word embeddings and semantic similarity metrics. Even though word embeddings are used to solve a variety of business problems, their effectiveness in searching for similar employee objectives is not sufficiently studied. In accordance with the feedback received from the Human Resources department of a partner company, the system proved to be effective in reducing both the time and effort consumed in the matching process.