"Boomerang Employees: The People You Re-Rehire May Be Fooling Yous" - 08/26/20 Edition
Stephen Says Column




Dear Stephen,

I work for a major manufacturer that is in the habit of rehiring a lot of people who have quit from here. I believe the expression is they "boomerang."

I work for a great company. We have a specific culture (like everyone thinks about their company culture). Ours is driven by sales and the amount of money you can make by selling a lot of our product through dealers and often directly to end users. We tend to hire salespeople from outside the industry more than most furniture companies. When we started we were known to manufacture a lot of unique products. Ergonomically driven, we started with keyboards and now make some of the best seating, tables, etc., you get the idea. It is a privately owned company where the majority owner is King. I like my job, and I even like the King.

I think because the company is so sales driven there is not enough career advancement here. Just sell more, make more money. Promotability to management at the executive level does not exist that much. We are all really just glorified salespeople here, no matter what the title. If you want to run a business or gain more experience as a more senior executive, you have to quit and go to a competitor.

Sometimes the person who leaves does great at their new job, but most times I have noticed it never works out. Within two years the people who have quit here come crawling back to us. Our boss is very human, and he personally likes most of the people that leave, so he hires them back.

Most times these former employees who return become favored and leapfrog ahead. When a rare, higher level job does come up, they come back to us. What bothers me even more, often they leave again in the next two years. It's almost like you can take a sabbatical from this company I work at, come back, be rewarded and even leave again. Is this very common? What is the track record with boomerang employees today? Why do bosses hire people back?

Signed,

Bewildered by the Boomerang
 


Taken as a whole, these findings call into question
some of the proposed benefits of rehiring former employees.


Dear Bewildered,

Funny you should ask. A few years ago I addressed this same question in this very column because there are a number of companies, both manufacturers and dealers, who frequently hire back their employees after they bolt for a job that provides a career promotion elsewhere. At the time, my response was that I often recommended to my own clients there was little harm in hiring someone back. I was following that old cliché "better the devil you do know than the devil you don't." It made sense to me that these boomerang employees — workers who have left an organization and are later rehired by that same organization — may present an enticing opportunity. They are already familiar with the workplace culture and have training and institutional knowledge of the organization under their belts.

However, new research to be published in the Journal of Management calls into question some of the assumed benefits of rehiring and suggests organizations may want to think twice before welcoming boomerang employees back.

According to the research, job performance before and after being rehired revealed boomerang managers' performance tended to remain the same — rather than increase or decrease — after being rehired. Furthermore, boomerang managers performed similarly to internally and externally hired managers in the first year on the job, but both internal and external hires improved more than rehires over time. Internal and external hires were also less likely to turn over from the organization than rehires. Finally, they found boomerang managers who turned over a second time tended to do so for reasons similar to their initial turnover reasons. So, bottom line is many of these people hired back leave again, the Journal of Management tells us and for the same reasons. Just like you said in your letter.

Taken as a whole, these findings call into question some of the proposed benefits of rehiring former employees.

This research provides some of the first comparisons between boomerang employees and the two traditional sources of employees. It seems you should go out and recruit new employees and not be so lazy about training. According to the researchers, factors organizations may want to consider before hiring a boomerang employee include reason for initial departure, time horizon of performance and availability of other types of hires. How desperate are you to hire back someone who quit your company? Bottom line to me: Now is the devil that you know, it's still a devil?!

So you have a good question which is more relevant today because many people who lost their jobs are the last people hired at a company, now fired from that new job — and back knocking on your company's door.

My new advice to hiring managers? Think twice before answering that knock. You may be hiring someone just desperate for a job because they think they can come home again, as opposed to someone who is excited about bringing you a new skill set and maybe new ideas and new customers. When you have an opening today, go out and recruit some fresh and — diverse — new employees for your company. Recycling is great, just not when it comes to employees.

Signed,

Stephen
 

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Stephen Viscusi is a bestselling author, television personality, and CEO of The Viscusi Group,
global executive recruiters located in New York.
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