Many organisations are reluctant to rehire employees but one HR head says employers should welcome boomerangs with open arms.
Many organisations are reluctant to rehire employees but it’s an aversion they’re going to have to get over – that’s the message from one Silicon Valley CEO who says boomeranging is here to stay.
“Boomeranging is becoming more common because the millennial generation in general believes that they should not stay in jobs for what boomers or generation x would say is the minimum time,” says Lee Caraher, CEO of San Francisco-based Double Forte.
Caraher – who recently penned ‘The Boomerang Principle’ – says millennials tend to define minimum tenure as two to three years while older generations consider it five to seven years. They also believe they’re going to have up to six different careers and may have up to 15 different jobs.
“The economy has told them this and their parents who got laid off in the financial crisis have told them this,” says Caraher. “Some of those parents are still looking for work commensurate with their experience and they’ve really counselled their millennial children not to count on one company, to move around and learn different things.”
The shift from career ladder to career lattice, combined with millennials’ vastly different expectations, means most will inevitably leave within a few years, says Caraher. It’s for this reason that employers would be making a major business mistake if they avoid rehiring former staff.
“When people leave, they go and learn other things and they become more valuable,” she tells HRM. “So if you have a mind-set that people could return, then recruitment just got a lot easier and your option pool got a lot bigger.”
Another reason employers should encourage boomeranging is because returning employees are much easier to on-board and can get up to speed faster than brand new staff.
“Everything’s moving so much faster today that we want fast on-boarders and of course you can’t rehire everybody but if you can rehire a couple of people out of 20 or even 100, you will get to efficiency much faster than if everybody’s new to your organisation.”
