Paysa points to Yahoo and Uber as prime examples of how talent flow can reveal future potential. When Uber launched in December 2009, its talent rank was 10,025, while Yahoo was among the top 20. Few expected the young start-up to provide better career opportunities than the established giant, but the flow of talent proved to be an indicator for future development: Today Yahoo has to cut budgets while Uber is now worth more than 50 billion dollars.

Quantifying and tracking the flow of tech talent is not easy. Paysa’s machine-learning algorithm has aggregated and analysed nearly eight million points of data, including job postings, resumes, and social activity, across 200,000 companies over the past  ten years. The data for example reveals that when Twitter’s rank fell from 8th in 2015 to 17th in 2016, its top employees migrated to companies like Google, Uber, Facebook, Lyft, Airbnb, and LinkedIn. The data also suggests that the biggest talent comeback stories of 2016 occurred inside of Starbucks, Hulu, Websense, Adobe, Capital One, Frontier Communications, Netflix, and Fidelity Investments, all of whom reached a high position in years past, fell down the rankings, and made a glorious return this year.

Read more at Fastcompany