Boomerang employees are those who join their former companies for a second stint. Companies hire their ex-employees because they see some clear advantages such as – familiarity with the company & culture; no training or onboarding required; assume they have improved from outside experience etc.
HBR recently did a study to understand if the Boomerang employees were actually living up to the above assumptions.
Their findings were quite opposite to general belief:
- Boomerang employees’ performance tends to remain the same. Also their reasons for leaving the organization for the second time tend to be similar to their first departures.
- Both internal and external hires improve more over time than rehires – their initial advantage of being familiar with company, culture, processes help in the initial years where they show better offtake than new hires, but later new hires do better
- Boomerang employees are more likely to turn over than both internal and external hires – they have left once, they would do again.
Now, this cannot be an objective truth as it may depend company to company or sector or employees themselves. I am myself a boomerang employee and have stayed spent double the time than my first stint.
Would love to hear your thoughts. What do you think?