A boomerang employee is a former employee, including someone your company laid off, who comes back to work for you again later. In 2026, boomerang hiring is no longer a rare exception or an awkward favor. According to ADP Research’s analysis of payroll data, boomerang employees made up 35 percent of all new hires in March 2025, up from 31 percent a year earlier, and boomerang employees have consistently represented roughly a third of new hires since 2018 despite being only about 2 percent of the active workforce at any given time. For a recruiter or hiring manager staring at an application from someone you let go eighteen months ago, the real question is not whether boomerang hiring is a legitimate strategy. It clearly is. The real question is whether to rehire this specific person, and how to make that call on evidence instead of nostalgia for how well things used to go.

Why boomerang hiring is surging in 2026

Boomerang hiring is surging because layoffs, skills scarcity, and slower voluntary quitting have collided at the same time. Voluntary quits have fallen more than 25 percent from their March 2022 “Great Resignation” peak, which means fewer people are testing the outside market on their own terms, and more are open to a known employer calling them back.

A few forces are driving it specifically in 2026:

• Layoffs created a large, findable alumni pool. Multiple rounds of tech and corporate layoffs since 2023 mean companies now have thousands of recently departed, still qualified former employees to draw from instead of starting a cold search.
• Specialized skills are scarce. In roles concentrated in a few metro areas or requiring niche expertise, a known former employee can be faster to find and qualify than sourcing a stranger.
• The information sector leads the trend. ADP found that nearly two thirds of new information sector hires in March 2025 were returning employees, roughly double the rate from a year earlier, and that sector has averaged 45 percent boomerang hires over the trailing twelve months compared with 30 percent economy wide since 2018.
• AI and tech hiring specifically is pulling people back. Reporting on 2025 hiring at major tech employers found that returning former employees filled a meaningful share of newly created AI engineering roles, as companies raced to staff specialized teams with people who did not need ramp up time.
• Workers are having second thoughts. Survey data from UKG’s Workforce Institute found 43 percent of pandemic era job switchers now believe they were better off at their previous employer, and Visier’s research found 78 percent of people who left a job said they would want their old job back, with more than two thirds of that group having actively tried to return.

The case for rehiring people you laid off

The strongest argument for boomerang hiring is that a former employee is the closest thing recruiting has to a known quantity. You already have real performance history instead of a resume and an interview’s worth of impressions.

The data backs up the upside:

• Faster ramp up. HR Morning’s research on boomerang outcomes found returning employees reach full productivity roughly 50 percent faster than a comparable external hire, because institutional knowledge, tooling familiarity, and relationships do not have to be rebuilt from zero.
• Lower hiring risk. Robert Half survey data found 94 percent of senior managers say they would rehire an employee who left on good terms, and UKG found 85 percent of HR professionals had received an application from a former employee in the past five years, with 40 percent of those employers hiring roughly half of the alumni who applied.
• Better retention after the rehire. HR Morning’s analysis found boomerang employees show 44 percent higher three year retention than a brand new external hire, likely because they are returning with clearer, more realistic expectations the second time around.
• Real cost savings. Multiple industry analyses, including work summarized by Harvard Business Review and PeoplePath, put the cost per hire for a boomerang employee at 33 to 50 percent lower than sourcing, screening, and onboarding an unknown external candidate.
• A credibility signal to the team. When a respected former colleague chooses to come back, it can validate the direction leadership has taken since they left, which is a morale boost current staff notice.

The risks nobody puts in the job requisition

None of that upside cancels out the real risk in boomerang hiring, and glossing over it is how companies end up regretting a rehire.

• The “why did they really leave” question. If someone was laid off for performance or role elimination reasons rather than a voluntary move for opportunity, rehiring them without honestly revisiting that history repeats the original problem. Visier’s analysis of layoff boomerang patterns found that among laid off workers who do return, high performers are rehired at a rate 120 percent higher than mid or low performers, mid tenured staff (10 to 15 years) return at a 42 percent higher rate, and managers specifically return at a 68 percent higher rate than individual contributors. That pattern cuts both ways: it can mean layoffs cut valuable people for reasons unrelated to their performance, or it can mean the people most eager to come back are the ones a team most wanted to keep in the first place. Either way, the “why” deserves a real answer, not an assumption.
• Team morale and perception. Current employees who stayed through a layoff, absorbed extra work, and rebuilt the team can resent watching someone who left, sometimes for more pay elsewhere, walk back in without having shared any of that burden. Left unmanaged, this shows up as quiet resentment rather than an open complaint, which makes it easy for leadership to miss.
• Pay equity against the team that stayed. This is the risk most often skipped entirely. Visier’s research found returning boomerang employees receive an average pay increase of roughly 25 percent over their old salary, and separately found returning workers negotiate roughly a 5 percent bump on rehire compared with about 2 percent average increases for employees who never left. If a rehired employee lands meaningfully above tenured peers who never left, that gap becomes a retention risk for exactly the people you did not want to lose, and it is the kind of disparity that surfaces fast under current pay transparency rules.
• A shorter fuse the second time. Some research frames repeat departures as a real retention risk in their own right, since a boomerang employee who has already proven they will leave once may be more comfortable leaving again if the new role does not meet expectations quickly.
• Cost when it goes wrong. Visier’s modeling of layoff boomerang patterns in the finance sector alone estimated roughly 19 million dollars in added 2024 cost from rehiring returning employees at a pay premium, a reminder that boomerang hiring done reflexively, without real evaluation, is not automatically the cheap option it looks like on paper.

How to evaluate a boomerang candidate fairly, not on nostalgia

Evaluate a boomerang candidate on the same evidence you would require from any other finalist: current skills, verified reasons for leaving, and a clear eyed look at team fit today, not a mental highlight reel of how well things went before.

1. Revisit the real reason they left, in writing. Pull the exit interview notes and the last performance review before the conversation goes any further. If the departure involved a performance concern, a policy issue, or a conflict that never got resolved, that has to be addressed directly rather than smoothed over because the relationship feels familiar.
2. Reassess current skills instead of assuming they are unchanged. People, tools, and role requirements all move in eighteen months or more. Run the same structured skill assessment you would use on any external finalist for the role, and treat a strong past track record as context, not as a substitute for current proof. Glider’s guide on how to structure skill based evaluation covers how to build that kind of consistent, comparable process.
3. Check references from the people who actually worked with them, not just the ones you already trust. A former manager’s memory can be generous in hindsight. Use a consistent reference check process that asks a former peer or a manager from a different team the same direct questions you would ask about any other candidate, including whether they would rehire that person themselves.
4. Benchmark pay against the team that stayed, not against their old salary. Set the offer using current internal pay bands for the role and level, and flag it for a pay equity review before it goes out, rather than anchoring on what would make the boomerang candidate feel appropriately valued for having left and come back.
5. Talk to the current team before finalizing the decision. A quick, honest check with the people who will actually work alongside this rehire surfaces relationship history and morale concerns while there is still time to plan for them, instead of after the person has already started.
6. Treat them as a real candidate in a real process, not a shortcut. Put the boomerang candidate through the same stages, scorecards, and sign offs as anyone else being considered for the role. Skipping steps because “we already know them” is exactly how avoidable mismatches happen.
7. Track the outcome afterward. Measure ramp up time, retention, and performance for boomerang hires the same way you track quality of hire for any other hiring channel, so the next boomerang decision is based on your own results instead of general industry data.

Boomerang hiring versus internal mobility

Boomerang hiring and internal mobility solve a similar underlying problem, filling a role with someone whose ability is already partly known, but they are not the same decision. Internal mobility moves someone already on staff into a new role, so the evaluation question is about the next challenge, not a gap in employment. Boomerang hiring brings back someone who left the company entirely, so the evaluation has to reconstruct what changed both in the person and in the role during the time they were gone. A healthy talent strategy uses both, but boomerang hiring specifically calls for reverifying skills and fit rather than assuming they carried over from before the person left.

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