Should You Go Back to a Former Employer?

Should you go back to a former employer? More often than the old stigma suggests. Boomerang hires, people rehired by a company they had already left, made up 35% of new hires in March 2025, the highest share in ADP's own payroll data since it started tracking the figure in 2018, up from 31% a year earlier. Returning used to read as a last resort. The payroll data says it is now closer to routine, though routine is not the same as automatic, and the reason a former employer says yes again is not usually nostalgia.

Should you go back to a former employer, according to the data

The scale of the shift is easy to undercount from the outside. Boomerang hires make up only 2% of all active employees in ADP's data going back to 2018, yet they account for 31% of new hires on average, a gap that shows how disproportionately often a company reaches for someone it already employed once, rather than a random face from the applicant pool. Quits have also fallen more than 25% from their March 2022 peak, so fewer people are leaving a job in the first place, which makes every return stand out against a shrinking pool of departures rather than a shrinking appetite to rehire.

Why the trend concentrates in tech

Nearly two thirds of new information-sector hires in March 2025 were returning employees, roughly double the rate from a year earlier, the sharpest concentration ADP measures in any sector. Over the trailing twelve months, information-sector rehires averaged 45%, against a 30% historical baseline since 2018. A sector that ran heavy layoffs and then went back to hiring left both sides holding more information about each other than usual: the employer knows exactly how that engineer or product manager handled a real deadline, and the returning worker knows exactly what the job is actually like day to day, which cuts the guesswork a stranger's resume cannot remove.

Why employers say yes faster than they used to

A known former employee skips a step a stranger cannot. Skills-based hiring research on 11,300 roles found the practical hiring change most firms managed was small, because a résumé and an interview still leave a hiring manager guessing at how someone actually performs under pressure. A returning employee removes that guess. A manager already has a read on how the person handles ambiguity, gives and takes feedback, and finishes something once the interesting part is over, and that read came from watching it happen, not from a reference call.

Why "they already know me" is not enough

The trust that gets a former employee back in the door is backward looking. What decides whether the return actually works is what changed since they left. A checkable claim or a demonstrated skill still predicts performance better than a track record alone, and a former employer's goodwill can quietly assume the returning person is the same person who left, in a role, a team, and a set of tools that have all moved on. The six domains that separate a strong hire from a mediocre one, judgment, communication, adaptability among them, do not freeze the day someone hands in notice. Someone returning after two years away should expect to show growth, not just familiarity.

When going back works, and when it does not

A return tends to work when the reason for leaving was about timing or scope, a move, a chance to try something else, a role that outgrew what the team needed then. It tends to work poorly when the reason for leaving is still sitting there unaddressed: the same unclear expectations, the same unresolved conflict, the same ceiling. Going back does not undo the original reason for leaving on its own. It only makes sense once something specific about the situation, the role, the manager, the scope, has actually changed, not just the calendar.

The honest limit

This is national payroll data, not a guarantee about any single return. ADP's own figures describe hiring patterns across employers, not a forecast for one team or one manager, and a former employer saying yes again says nothing about whether the specific role, team, or reason for leaving has actually changed. What made a boomerang hire common at the national level does not make any single return a good idea, that judgment still belongs to the two people in the room.