Boomerang employees are defined as employees who leave a company and eventually get hired back. According to a recent study of 1,800 HR professionals, the trend is growing, with 76% of hiring professionals more accepting of the trend today than in the past, and 46% of Millennials open to the idea of returning to a former employer.
“Boomerangs are uniquely valuable because they offer an outsider perspective combined with an insider’s knowledge of company process and culture,” says LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman.
Experts estimate it can cost as much as twice an employee’s salary to recruit, hire and train a new worker, according to the New York Times. Each boomerang employee can save a company an average of $18-20K in recruiting fees and hit the ground running twice as fast as a new hire.
“There’s a new perspective,” says Dan Schawbel, founder of WorkplaceTrends.com. “Companies realize that when hiring boomerang employees they get up to speed quicker.” Perhaps that’s why over half of HR professionals and managers said they give high or very high priority to former employees that left professionally and amicably.
Startlingly, however, 80 percent of employees say their former employers do not have a strategy in place to encourage them to return, and nearly half of managers claim there are no alumni communications. While 98% of Fortune 500s have LinkedIn alumni groups (over 118K corporate alumni groups total), the vast majority of these are independently run, unaffiliated with the company of origin.
“An ex-employee will be more interested in returning if the company stayed in touch and maintained a relationship in the interim,” says Reid Hoffman. Hoffman’s co-author on the New York Times Bestselling book, The Alliance, Chris Yeh, suggests that corporations create and maintain an exclusive alumni database that is very easy to carve up, is linked to LinkedIn, and allows for organization.
Download the infographic to learn how boomerangs cut your cost and time to hire in half.
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