Boomerang employees: Why some companies see former workers as the future

In 2018, Lien Ceulemans left Salesforce for a new job at Google in London. She returned to the cloud software group, becoming a “boomerang” employee, last year. “The people I used to work with reached out when a role came up,” she says.

Her return was, in part, personal. She wanted a job in Brussels, to be close to her family. Professionally, it was a step up, becoming country leader at a time when the company is forging new working patterns as it emerges from the pandemic.

Returning to an old employer had advantages. Ceulemans was already familiar with the culture. "If you already know the organisation, it's easier to get on." Over the past two years, many new starters have had to grapple with remote interviews and onboarding and home-working, making it particularly hard to get a handle on their new organisations.

Keen to fill labour shortages, employers have tried recruitment parties, hiring bonuses, wage increases and perks. Now some are considering previous employees. According to LinkedIn, the professional social network, 4.5 per cent of new recruits on its platform were boomerangs last year, compared with 3.9 per cent in 2019.

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EnterpriseAlumni, which creates software for organisations to help them manage their corporate alumni, says about 24 per cent of alumni on their platforms apply for a job at a former employer.

For the employer there can be a financial boon to hiring boomerangs, with a reduction in recruitment and training costs and an increase in productivity. One study by Cornell University compared the work experiences of just in excess of 2,000 boomerangs and almost 11,000 new hires in a large, US-based healthcare organisation. It found that boomerangs outperformed new hires, especially in roles that involved "relatively high levels of administrative co-ordination, such as project manager and purchasing agent".

Mike Ettling, chief executive of Unit4, a cloud-based software company, says: "You've always been able to talent arbitrage, but now you have this phenomenon [the Great Resignation post-pandemic] happening everywhere, the single biggest technique to find [recruits] in another pond has gone." This means employers will need to experiment.

Alumni network

Alumni are increasingly important to recruiters, Ettling says. This might mean changing the way an employer frames staff departures. Rather than saying goodbye, he suggests welcoming departing staff to the alumni network, a principle he practises himself.

“Stop thinking of it as a negative – they potentially could come back to us. Let’s see it as a positive.” This mindset also changes the tone of exit interviews. “Too many people go into the conversation with a rescue approach. I’d rather [talk] about how we can help you in the next role.”

Maral Kazanjian, chief people officer at Moody's, the ratings agency, and herself a recent boomerang, says she has seen "organisations treating [departing employees] as disloyal".

Andrea Legnani, global head of alumni relations at Citi, detects a shift in corporate attitudes to recently departed staff: "Employers are thinking of alumni as an opportunity rather than a betrayal." In the past, he says, alumni "were mostly retirees, now companies are looking at alumni as employees of the future". His company estimates about 10 per cent of its current global workforce are boomerangs.

An alumni network can help employers discover how to target boomerangs. Legnani says that he learnt that Citi employees in Africa were being lured by start-ups. "We were able to do a specific letter to [this population], saying there are jobs for tech workers."

He also adds that alumni networks can change the way staff who were made redundant through a merger or cost-cutting, for example, feel about their former employer. They might feel rejected, he says, and an alumni network can provide a “different voice”.

However, employers must be conscious that if they are hiring from a historical talent pool it could counter efforts to diversify the workforce. Champions of alumni networks meanwhile argue that formalising such structures would overcome informal networks of patronage.

Rejoining the company

Nisha Vasan left the Walt Disney Company to join WeWork in March 2020 and rejoined the film and entertainment group at the start of this year, after a 12-month stint elsewhere. She says that "it is a joy to onboard when you already know some of the people". This was especially so after joining two organisations in the pandemic.

“This is my third remote onboarding. The hardest part of being a new employee is building relationships. The familiarity is comforting, [knowing] the organisational structure, how teams work, has made it seamless.” However, the group she has returned to is not exactly the one she left. “There’s been a lot of change at the company. You’re not starting at ground zero. You’re not starting at 10, but somewhere [in between].”

Ettling says that in growing companies, boomerangs might find the business is very different to the one they left. “The worst thing you can do is expect [a boomerang] to be fine. Often I get emails from [them] saying, ‘Wow the company’s so different’.”

While research indicates that boomerangs might outperform external hires, Alison Dachner, assistant professor of management at the Boler College of Business, John Carroll University, says that, for long-term performance benefits, internal hires might prove more effective than convincing ex-employees to return.

Boomerangs are likely to have negotiated higher pay and better job descriptions. Managers need to be conscious of the impact of well-paid returning employees on their teams' morale. It may send out a signal that the only way to increase salaries is to leave the company.

Dachner does not recommend employers “talent hoard” but rather “improve ease of movement and role transitions”. So alumni should be considered a “part of overall talent management which includes supporting internal mobility”. Salesforce, for example, has a dedicated internal recruiting team to help employees find new opportunities at the company. Erin Makarius, associate professor of management at Ohio’s University of Akron, says companies should focus more on internal promotions, having regular coaching or career conversations. “How often do employers say: ‘Where do you want to go next?’” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022