Rehiring People Who Already Worked for You

When a good employee leaves on good terms, the company knows a lot about them. It knows how quickly they learned, who liked working with them, what they were good at and where they struggled. Where does all that knowledge go?

In most companies, into the HRIS, as a termination date. And there it stays.

That seems like a strange waste once you think about what a former employee is as a candidate. Hiring an outsider is a bet. You're guessing, from a resume and a few conversations, whether someone will fit and perform. With a former employee, much of that bet has already been settled. They know your systems and how your teams work. They know things no resume captures: where decisions really get made, which processes are mostly ceremony, who the real experts are. They've also spent time somewhere else, picked up new skills, and chosen to come back, which is a more deliberate decision than most applications.

So you'd expect rehires to do well, and the figures people quote say they do. One estimate has boomerang hires onboarding about 40% faster than external hires and staying longer at the two-year mark. I wouldn't lean hard on any single number like that, but the direction is what you'd predict. Someone who already knows the place doesn't need three months to become useful. They might need three weeks.

Given all that, you'd expect companies to treat former employees as a core source of candidates. Mostly they don't, and most don't even track how many rehires they make. Why?

The main reason is mundane. Former employees live in the HRIS, and recruiting runs through the ATS. These are different systems owned by different teams. One records that someone left; the other records whether someone got hired. Nothing connects them. When a person leaves in good standing, no workflow flags them, reminds anyone to get back in touch in a year, or brings them up when a matching role opens.

Some larger companies try alumni networks: a LinkedIn group, a newsletter, an exit survey promising to stay in touch. These rarely produce much, because they depend on luck. The former employee has to be subscribed, see the post, and think to apply at the exact moment you happen to be hiring. Nobody is actively connecting the person to the role.

At most mid-sized companies it's worse than that. When a former employee applies, they're handled as a cold applicant. The recruiter may not know they worked there, since the ATS doesn't pull their history from the HRIS, and the manager who hired them the first time isn't told. They answer the same questions as everyone else, and years of context about them are invisible to the people deciding. If the role drew a few hundred applications, they may never be reached at all, and get rejected before anyone reads their name.

That last part is the one I think about most, because it's the part we can do something about. Asendia phones every applicant soon after they apply, evenings included, and runs a structured screening conversation with them. It asks follow-up questions based on what the person actually says, so a returning employee's story comes out on its own: what they've done since they left, why they want to come back, what they expect this time. Nobody has to tell Asendia the person is a rehire for that to happen. What the recruiter finds in the ATS the next morning is a written summary of the conversation, in the same shape as everyone else's, since every applicant was asked the same core questions.

Imagine what that summary might say: away for two years, built a function at a competitor, coming back for a specific reason. That's what a recruiter would want to know before anything else, and here it comes from the candidate sitting at position 280 in the queue, who would otherwise have been screened out without a call. It doesn't fix the gap between the HRIS and the ATS. But it does mean the rehire gets heard.

This is a narrow case of a broader pattern. When shortlists keep disappointing, the problem is usually at the first conversation rather than in the candidate pool, and I wrote about how to tell which one you have in the post on talent shortages and screening shortages.

Recruiting spends a lot of money chasing passive candidates, and I've argued that the passive candidate premium is mostly a myth. Former employees are close to the opposite case: an advantage that's real and mostly ignored. You already paid for their onboarding once. When they left on good terms, you learned that the hire worked out. The least your process can do is notice when they come back.

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