(This column originally appeared in The Guardian)
Say you’re running a business and you bump into a favored former employee and find out she’s interested in coming back to work for you. Is your first thought: “What a great opportunity to pay her less?” And if so, what is wrong with you?
Boomerang hires — those workers who work for a company, leave the company, then come back to the company — can be extremely valuable. What’s curious is how many of my clients don’t seem to realize this.
Quartz recently reported that boomerang hires were being offered significantly lower compensation from their former employers than they had earned when they worked there previously.
“Creative professionals including writers, designers, PR staff, and marketing executives — even some public-sector staff — describe a pattern of former employers reaching out with familiar work, only at sharply reduced rates,” they wrote.
Why? Some employers are citing AI as the problem as if AI — with its massive hallucination rates, inaccuracies and errors — can be relied upon as a replacement for workers.
The New York Times recently reported that “of the 80% of companies using generative AI, just as many say they’ve seen no significant bottom-line impact, with as many as 42% of companies reporting they abandoned most of their AI pilot projects by the end of 2024, up sharply from 17% a year earlier”. Another report from MIT found that about 95% of AI pilot programs “fail to deliver measurable profit-and-loss impact”.
The age of AI actually replacing workers is still a long way off and, if anything, a boomerang hire that knows the job has the potential to leverage AI to be even more productive than before.
Lower compensation can also be tied to budget issues, because, as one recruitment expert told Quartz: “Leaders feel pressure to show savings fast, so they reopen a familiar seat at a discount instead of rescoping the work.”
These employers are making a big mistake.
People leave their jobs for all sorts of reasons, both personal and professional. Younger employees in particular are more used to hopping around from company to company more so than their older counterparts. And given the lack of corporate loyalty, who can blame them? Changing jobs — and then changing back — is just a fact of these times. It’s not a negative. It’s a reality of today’s workplace.
Which is why a boomerang hire is much more valuable to an employer than any other hire. They’ve seen your business, worked with your people, and they actually want to come back! Other employees see this and think to themselves that your company must be doing something right if this good person left and then wanted to return.
Another advantage: if an employee has been away for a while, they have likely worked at other, similar companies. As a business owner, you should be mining that person for information. This is valuable knowledge.
A boomerang hire comes with much less risk because you know what you’re getting. You don’t need references, background checks or testing: it’s all happened before. Without lifting a finger, you’re already saving money when you hire this person.
So now you’re proposing to pay them less?
Employees are not auto parts, cans of beans or construction materials where negotiating the lowest cost is encouraged. They are people. Offering to pay them less than what they were paid before — despite all the benefits an employer gets by hiring them back — is insulting, degrading and embarrassing and will do nothing more than create resentment. This is not the way to treat people. And it’s no way to run a growing business that relies on great talent as its core asset.
If you’re not convinced, then consider the legal ramifications. According to the Quartz report a number of states have “retaliation” provisions included in their labor laws. An employment law attorney said in the article that it’s a risk for employers not to consider these rules.
“The real issue isn’t the lower offer itself,” he explained. “It’s what employers say during these conversations. I’ve seen companies admit they’re ‘testing the waters or assume someone will work for less because they’re desperate. Those statements become smoking guns.”
The labor market is still tight and the competition for good talent is high. If you’re an employer that has the chance to hire a former worker — regardless of who initiates the conversation — that’s reliable and productive then don’t be dumb by insulting that worker with a lower pay offer. You’re not doing the math correctly.
