Should You Rehire Boomerang Employees at Your Company?

Should you rehire boomerang employees? The hesitation that comes with that question deserves actual attention. The choice to rehire a former employee comes with genuine upside and genuine downside, usually in equal measure. Those stakes reach every person on your team.

A few issues tend to come up when a company brings back a former employee. Compensation is usually the first one to sort out. If the person has grown professionally after they left, their market rate has probably grown right along with them. Whatever number made sense two years ago might not be competitive anymore.

On top of pay, there's the morale question, and it tends to get underestimated. Those who stayed through the hard parts are going to see who walked out and who got invited back in. That situation doesn't always land the way leadership thinks it will.

The question worth asking is whether the root problems that drove the departure were ever dealt with. If nothing has changed on that front, a return is probably going to end the same way – it's worth raising directly before an offer goes out.

Most employers don't give this call the weight it deserves. A strong rehire can cut the onboarding time down dramatically – the returning employee already knows the culture, the tools and the team, so there's no long ramp-up period.

The cost to recruit also drops considerably as the full search and vetting process is mostly no longer necessary. And in some cases, the skill set that comes back is actually stronger than the one that left. Time away from a company usually means the person spent some time somewhere else and picked up new capabilities and a much wider perspective.

None of that is a given, of course. With the right circumstances, a boomerang hire can be one of the better moves that a company makes.

Let's look at whether a boomerang hire is the right move for you!

What Is a Boomerang Employee

A boomerang employee is what the name implies – a person who had left a company and eventually came back to work there again. It's a workplace term that lives up to its name.

The reasons a person might leave a job can be all over the place. A few might head to a competitor, and others go off to freelance or start their own company. Some just need a break from the workforce before they feel ready to come back to it. Every once in a while, a person will take a sharp turn into a different career – only to eventually find their way back to a former employer.

This happens all the time. Apple, Goldman Sachs and Starbucks (a few of the biggest names in the world) have all brought former employees back, and it's well documented. What's more, plenty of these businesses have welcomed back employees who had a much messier exit.

The boomerang hire is worth a look, mostly because of how much it stands apart from a standard hire. An employee who comes back already knows the business, the team and how work actually gets done day-to-day – none of that needs to be re-explained to them from scratch.

A brand-new hire will need a longer ramp-up and quite a bit more guidance in those early weeks, since they walk in without any of that foundation. With a boomerang, most of that groundwork is already in place before day one.

That said, a shared history between the two of them doesn't automatically make this an easy call – and in quite a few ways, it can make it harder. That familiarity comes back with the person (the upside and the downside), and it's why a boomerang hire deserves far more careful thought than it tends to get.

Why So Many Workers Keep Coming Back

The numbers here are actually worth a look. At any given time, anywhere from 20% to 25% of new hires are former employees – workers who left the company at some point and at some later point decided to come back, which comes out to a pretty large slice of the workforce. It's a trend that most employers haven't started talking about openly just yet.

Most of this goes back to the Great Resignation of 2021 and 2022. Over those two years, millions of workers just walked away from their jobs to find something better – higher pay, more flexibility or just more fulfilling work. By most accounts, it ended up being one of the biggest waves of workers leaving their jobs that the modern workforce had ever seen.

For many of the workers, what came next wasn't quite what they had in mind. The new role didn't always match what they'd pictured, and a number of them ended up missing aspects they hadn't given much thought to – a workplace culture that had already started to feel like home, relationships that had taken years to develop and a familiarity with how to get work done without having to figure everything out all over again. That sort of experience has genuine value.

Great Resignation alumni aren't the only ones who come back, though. Former employees return for all kinds of reasons – a business venture that didn't pan out, a family move and a career change that led somewhere different.

What's changed is that hiring managers are far more willing to have these conversations than they were even a decade ago. There was a time when rehiring an employee who had left felt like admitting that something had gone wrong – on one side or the other. That stigma has largely faded, and the data backs it up.

What Former Employees Bring Back to the Table

Recruitment is expensive (in time and money), and every week a position stays open, your team is quietly losing productivity to cover that gap. Boomerang employees can move the process along much faster, because instead of piecing together a picture from resumes and a handful of interviews, you already have a real and proven track record to draw from. For a hiring choice that needs to be confident and well thought out, that head start matters quite a bit.

What they bring back with them is worth taking into account. Time away from your company usually means time spent somewhere else, and along the way, they come back having picked up new methods and better ways to solve problems. That outside experience is legitimately a benefit – it tends to show up in how they strategize their work, and it matters to the team around them.

There's also something to be said for the smoother transition. A returning employee already knows your processes, your culture and the team they'll be working with. That means less time on the basics and a faster path to actually contributing. For someone new to the company entirely, that learning curve takes actual time – and attention from everyone around them.

Add it all up, and the case is pretty strong. A returning employee already knows how the company works, costs less to get started than a total newcomer would and brings a fresh outside perspective from wherever they've been in the meantime. For a company that already has a working relationship with this person, that's a very strong foundation to build a new chapter on.

Why a Rehire Can Go Wrong

Any time a former employee comes back into consideration, it's worth asking why they left – if it was the pay, a manager they had a hard time with or a culture that just wasn't a great fit. An employee who returns to the same environment that they walked away from is very likely to walk away again for the same reasons. That can become a very expensive pattern.

The dynamic within the existing team matters here as well. Long-term employees who weathered the hard times alongside the company probably won't be thrilled to see a former colleague walk back in – especially when that person comes back with a better title or a higher salary than they have.

That resentment doesn't usually show itself early on – it tends to build quietly and (if left unaddressed) it can do damage to team morale over time. It can also affect how that returning employee is received day to day, even when everything looks fine.

The most important question to answer and also the easiest one is whether anything has actually changed (in a concrete and provable way) either in the organization, in the role itself or in the returning employee that would make it go differently this time. If an answer doesn't come to mind fairly fast, it's probably worth pausing on that. Without something tangible to point to, a rehire is just a bet on the situation somehow working out on its own.

What to Look for in a Rehire

With a clearer sense of what can go wrong in a rehire situation, the work itself is in how you'd review one of these candidates before any of the final decisions get made.

Before anything else, go back to the reason they left. If they resigned over management, workload or the company's culture, the question worth asking yourself is what has actually changed since then. An honest look at that history will tell you quite a bit about whether it even makes sense to bring them back.

From there, have an honest conversation with the candidate. Ask them what drew them back, what they've been working on since then and what they feel they've learned along the way. Quite a few hiring managers breeze past this part. But those answers can tell you far more about a person than anything else in the interview.

That last point is probably the biggest one in this whole conversation. When a former employee comes back, it's very tempting to just wave them through the hiring process because they've done the job before. Don't do it.

Run them through the exact same process that you'd use for any new hire – the same interviews, the same conversations and the same level of care and attention. That structure is worth it for the two of you, and it makes sure everyone knows what to expect well before their first day back.

A little extra care at the start matters in whether the rehire works out long-term.

What a Rehire Does to Your Team

When a former colleague walks back through the door with a better title or a higher salary compared to what a long-term employee is currently making, it can make that person stop and ask themselves what their years of loyalty have been worth. That reaction is fair – and it deserves an honest conversation.

None of that means the rehire was a bad call – it can well be the right move for the business. What it does mean is that the rest of the team deserves at least a little consideration in that process too.

A manager's best move is to get out ahead of the conversation before the rumor mill gets there first. The team doesn't need full transparency here – a line-by-line account of the whole negotiation is more than anyone expects. An honest explanation of why the person was brought back is all it takes. From what I've seen, team members are more willing to accept a call that they had no part in when they at least feel respected enough to hear the reason behind it.

The existing team deserves some acknowledgement in this. If somebody has been with the company for years without much recognition for that loyalty, now is actually a great time to change that. A returning employee's arrival doesn't have to create any tension – it can work as a natural opportunity to remind those who never left that their commitment still means something.

A little recognition goes a long way. What matters is that those who stayed feel every bit as valued as the person who came back.

Turn Former Employees Into a Talent Pipeline

An alumni network doesn't need to be some high-maintenance program. A monthly newsletter, a LinkedIn group, or just a personal message every now and then can do quite a bit to keep former employees in your orbit and nearby whenever you need them.

The big win here is timing. When a position opens up, you already have a warm list of candidates who know your culture, know the work and who have a track record with your team. A cold search from scratch takes time and energy that you don't always have – and in a competitive hiring market, that head start is worth quite a bit.

Former employees who stay in touch with your company can be a great source of referrals over time. Even if they have no plans to return themselves, they might know just the right person for a job that you're working to fill. Those relationships matter, and the best part is that they take almost no effort or money to keep.

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make with alumni relationships (something I see quite a bit) is that they treat them like a backup plan that only gets any attention when times get desperate. Former employees can read that energy pretty fast.

A much better way to go is to check in every now and then with no agenda at all. Congratulate them on their career milestones. When a person feels legitimately remembered and respected, they're far more likely to have you in mind when the right opportunity comes up – either for themselves or for a person they know.

An alumni network built on genuine relationships is one of the most underrated recruiting tools out there – and it only gets stronger with the time and care that you put into it.

Make a Call You Can Stand Behind

Whether a boomerang hire is the right call depends on your situation. The factors that matter most are if the original problems got resolved, if the person who left has legitimately grown in the time since and if your team is in a position to welcome that change.

When these factors are working in your favor, a boomerang hire can be one of the best moves a company makes. When they're not, it tends to create more problems than it fixes – and the red flags are usually there if you pay close enough attention.

The upside is that you're already ahead of others who face this type of choice, and that matters more than it might feel. Plenty of rehiring calls get made on gut instinct or on pure convenience – with almost no thought given to what went wrong the first time, let alone how the rest of the team would feel about having that person back.

The time that you've put into these questions already puts you in a much better position to make a call that you can stand behind, no matter which direction it ends up going.

Strong teams get built well beyond the offer letter. Great hires are one part of a much bigger picture. How onboarding goes, how your managers handle conflict and if your HR processes can hold up under pressure – that determines if a hire actually sticks, boomerang or not.

At HRDQ, we have training resources and tools built for managers and HR pros who run into these kinds of workplace challenges – the support that your team needs to build a stronger foundation if you're welcoming somebody back or you're starting from scratch.

With that in mind, if you're looking to sharpen the kind of level-headed and fact-based thinking that goes into decisions like these, our Critical Thinking Fundamentals is a great place to start – giving your team the tools to separate emotion from evidence and make smarter calls with more confidence.