How to Rehire a Former Employee (Boomerang Hires)

There is a specific feeling you get when a good employee walks out the door. You know the one. Someone who showed up on time, knew how to handle a rush, got along with the rest of the team, and then one day gave notice because they found something that paid more or wanted to try something different. You wished them well. You filled the position. And six months later you have had three people in that same role and none of them were as good.

Here is something worth knowing: a lot of those people come back.

According to ADP Research, 35% of all new hires in 2025 were returning employees. In retail, that number sits around 33%. These are people who left a job, spent time somewhere else, and decided to come back. The term for them is "boomerang employees," and for small businesses dealing with constant turnover, they represent one of the most underused hiring channels available.

Why Good Employees Leave and Come Back

Most people do not leave a job because they hate the business. They leave because something pulled them away: a higher wage, a closer commute, a schedule that worked better for their life, curiosity about a different kind of work. That is especially true for hourly workers in restaurants, retail, and service businesses.

What they often find after leaving is that the grass was not greener. The pay was a little better but the management was worse. The schedule was flexible but the chaos was exhausting. The new job did not feel like the one they left.

A prep cook from a restaurant in Costa Mesa told me she left to work at a hotel closer to home. Better pay, shorter drive. After eight months she was back. The hotel kitchen was disorganized, the management changed twice, and she missed knowing exactly what she was walking into every shift. The familiarity she had written off as boring turned out to be something she genuinely valued.

This is the pattern. Familiar culture, known coworkers, a manager they trusted, predictable expectations. Those things have real value that does not show up in a wage comparison. When someone realizes that, they often reach out.

Why Boomerang Hires Are Worth a Serious Look

The case for rehiring former employees comes down to one thing: reduced risk.

A brand new hire is an unknown quantity. You are making a guess based on an interview and a reference check. With a former employee, you already have real information. You know how they handled a slammed Saturday night. You know how they talked to customers when things went sideways. You know whether they were the kind of person who found things to do when it was slow or stood by the register checking their phone.

The data supports this. Research from Visier shows that boomerang employees have a 44% higher retention rate over three years compared to completely new hires. They get up to speed faster because they already know the product, the workflow, and the team. Training time is shorter. The time between "first day" and "working independently" is dramatically compressed.

For small businesses where the cost of a bad hire runs into the thousands, that risk reduction matters. We have written about the real cost of a bad hire for small businesses, and it is consistently higher than owners expect when you factor in training time, lost productivity, and the manager attention a struggling new hire consumes.

Who Is Worth Bringing Back (And Who Is Not)

Not every former employee is a good boomerang candidate. The reason they left and the way they left both matter.

Worth considering bringing back:

Someone who gave proper notice, trained their replacement, and left on genuinely good terms. Someone who left for a clear external reason: more pay, school, family, a move that reversed itself. Someone whose performance was consistently solid and whose departure was a loss you still feel.

Think twice about:

Someone who left because of a real conflict with management or a coworker, especially if that person is still on your team. Someone who was frequently late, unreliable, or had performance problems you were quietly relieved to be rid of. Someone who left without notice and left you short-staffed in a crunch. And anyone you let go rather than someone who resigned.

The honest question to ask yourself is: if I had to describe why they left and why they performed the way they did, does the answer give me confidence about what will be different this time? If not, you are probably trying to solve a staffing problem instead of making a real hire.

Most people return within 13 months, according to the same ADP research. The likelihood of a successful return drops substantially after 16 months, not because the person has changed, but because both the job and the person have moved on enough that the fit is no longer the same.

How to Keep the Door Open Before They Leave

The best time to set up a boomerang hire is during the exit itself.

Most small businesses treat exit interviews as a formality at best and skip them entirely at worst. That is a missed opportunity. A brief, honest conversation with someone on their way out the door does two things. It tells you what you can fix. And it leaves the relationship on good terms if they ever want to come back.

You do not need a formal process. Five questions at the end of their last shift is enough:

1. Why are you leaving?

2. Is there anything we could have done differently?

3. What did you like most about working here?

4. Is there anything about how we operate that you think we should change?

5. Would you ever consider coming back if the timing was right?

That last question is important. Most people say yes if the departure is amicable. And it signals to them that the door is open, which makes it much easier for them to reach out later without it feeling awkward.

We have a more detailed guide on how to run exit interviews at a small business if you want to build this into a repeatable process.

How to Reach Out Without It Being Awkward

If you are thinking about a specific former employee and wondering whether to reach out, the answer is almost always yes. The worst outcome is they say no or do not respond. The best outcome is you get someone back who already knows how to do the job.

Keep the message short and genuine. You are not writing a letter. You are sending a text or making a quick call.

Something like: "Hey, this is Maria from the shop. I know you moved on a while back but we have an opening and you were one of the best people we had. Would you be open to a quick conversation about it?"

That is it. No pressure, no guilt trip, no overselling. If they are interested they will say so. If they are not, they will appreciate that you thought of them and the relationship stays intact.

The best way to stay in a position to make that call is to maintain a simple list of former employees you would rehire. A note in your phone with names and contact info is enough. When you have an opening, that list is the first place you look, before you post on Indeed, before you put a sign in the window. Five minutes of outreach to three former employees costs nothing and might save you weeks of screening.

This is one of the reasons we often talk about employee referral programs for small businesses. Your current team also knows former coworkers worth bringing back. A casual conversation at shift change surfaces candidates who never appear on a job board.

How to Structure the Conversation

If a former employee responds and wants to talk, treat it like a real interview. Not an interrogation, but a real conversation where you actually learn what has changed.

Three things you want to understand:

Why they want to come back. Not the polished answer. The real one. If they say "I just really missed the team," that is fine. If they say "the new job pays less and I need something closer to home," that is also fine. You want to know what is actually driving it so you can assess whether the job is genuinely the right fit or whether you are a fallback option.

What has changed on their end. Did they pick up new skills? Did their schedule change? Are they looking for more hours or fewer? A server who spent a year at a different restaurant in Laguna Beach might have front-of-house experience you did not have to pay to develop. Find out.

What would need to be different for this to work. This is the one most business owners skip. If someone left because the scheduling was unpredictable, and you have not fixed the scheduling, bringing them back will produce the same result. Ask what they need. If it is something you can genuinely offer, say so. If it is not, be honest about that too.

What to Do Differently This Time

A boomerang hire only makes sense if something has actually changed, on their end, your end, or both.

The most common scenario: they left for higher pay and have come around to the fact that other parts of the job matter too. If you can get closer on compensation, even a small bump to honor the fact that they are not a new hire, you eliminate the main thing that pushed them out.

The second most common: they left for a life reason (school, a move, a family situation) that has since resolved. These are usually the cleanest rehires. Nothing was broken. They just needed to be somewhere else for a while.

Where rehires go wrong is when neither side actually addresses what caused the departure. Someone who left because of friction with a manager, and that manager is still there, is walking back into the same situation. The goodwill from being rehired lasts about two weeks and then the old dynamics reassert themselves.

If you ran exit interviews, pull your notes before this conversation. What did they say when they left? Has anything about those conditions changed? Be honest with yourself about the answer.

Onboarding a Returning Employee

A boomerang hire still needs onboarding, just a different kind.

The operational knowledge is mostly intact. They know the POS system, they know how the kitchen works, they know your regulars. What they need is a briefing on what has changed since they left.

Any new team members. Any changes to the menu or product line. Any policy updates. Any shifts in how you run things. A returning employee who assumes nothing has changed and acts accordingly will frustrate the people who have been there through those changes.

A simple conversation on their first day covers it: "Here is what is different from when you left." That is it. Twenty minutes, maximum. Then you can lean into the fact that they already know how everything else works.

The paperwork still applies. A returning employee is a new hire from an HR standpoint. I-9, W-4, DE 4, and the California Wage Theft Prevention notice all need to be completed fresh. Do not skip this because you feel like you already know them. See our guide on onboarding new employees at a small business for the California-specific documents you need.

The Restaurant Specific Case

For restaurants specifically, boomerang hiring is one of the most practical strategies available. Restaurant turnover in the U.S. runs above 70% annually according to the National Restaurant Association. Every owner is constantly in hiring mode.

The people you have already hired, trained, and worked with are a finite resource. You invested weeks of training time in each of them. When one leaves, that investment walks out the door. A boomerang hire lets you recover some of that investment.

A Mexican restaurant owner in Anaheim told me she started keeping a contact list of every server, host, and line cook who left in good standing. Two years in, she has rehired four of them. Two of those four are now leads. The training time for each of them was a fraction of what a new hire would have required, and she did not have to post a single listing to bring them back.

If you want to reduce how often you are in crisis mode on staffing, building this list is one of the highest-leverage things you can do. It costs you nothing and pays off every time you have an opening.

We cover the full restaurant staffing picture, including where to find candidates, how to evaluate them, and what to do when service positions turn over, in our guide to hiring restaurant staff.

Where My Friendly Staff Fits In

If your former employee network is not enough to fill an opening, you still need a fast way to screen new candidates. My Friendly Staff handles initial screening automatically: applicants call the number on your sign, an AI agent interviews them in English or Spanish, and you get a ranked summary of who called and what they said. It means you are not missing applicants who call while you are in the middle of a rush.

The combination works well. Check your boomerang list first. If that turns up a strong candidate, great. If not, put a sign up and let the screening run in the background while you focus on running the business. Either way, you are not wasting hours on phone tag with people who are not a fit.

Building a Pipeline, Not Just a Roster

The shift in thinking is this: your former employees are not just people who used to work for you. They are an ongoing pipeline of pre-vetted candidates who already understand your business.

Keep a contact list. Run a real exit conversation when people leave. Stay on good terms. Check in occasionally, not to recruit, just to stay connected. A quick "hope things are going well" text costs nothing and means that when you do reach out about an opening, it does not feel transactional.

The businesses I have seen do this well are usually the ones that treat departures not as failures but as intermissions. Some people come back. Some refer their friends. Some become regulars who tell others the business is a good place to work. None of that happens if you burn the bridge when they hand in their notice.

The Bottom Line

Thirty-five percent of new hires nationally are people who already worked for that employer before. The businesses driving that number are not doing anything complicated. They are keeping in touch with good people who left, and calling them first when a position opens.

If you have been in business for more than two years and have had any meaningful turnover, you probably have a list of five to ten people who left in good standing and who would have been worth keeping. Start there. Before the job board, before the sign in the window, text three of them.

The odds are better than you think, and the upside is a hire who shows up knowing exactly what they signed up for.