In the HireBest Foundations training, Craig della Penna tells interviewers to end certain conversations by reminding the person "that we want to recruit them back to this organization." That's not sentiment. It's an asset strategy: people who leave well are the one candidate pool that already knows your business, your customers, and your culture — and that you already have real performance data on.
The debate about "boomerang" hires usually runs on anecdotes: someone's great re-hire against someone's disaster. Both happen. The difference between them is almost never the fact of having left — it's whether anyone answered the question below before re-hiring.
The genuine upside
A returning employee needs a fraction of the onboarding, knows the systems and the people, and arrives with something no external candidate can offer: you've seen them work. Time-to-productivity shortens, referencing is trivial, and the risk that the job "isn't what they thought" — the driver behind so much first-year turnover — is nearly zero. They know exactly what they're coming back to.
There's a market case too: high-quality candidates are typically on the market for about ten days (Workonic, as cited in Cipher, ch. 2). Your alumni are a pipeline you can reach before a role even opens.
The genuine risk
Two, specifically:
- The halo. "The devil you know" is comfort, not evidence. Familiarity is exactly the raw material of similarity bias, and a warm memory of a former colleague can outshout the requirements of the new role.
- The wrong-role rerun. They were good in that job, then. The opening is a different job, now. Re-hiring the person into a role that merely resembles their old one is how good returners become bad rehires.
The one question
Would they clear the bar for this role if you'd never met them?
The way to answer it honestly is the way you'd answer it for a stranger: define what the role must deliver — a Cipher: charge, outcomes, deliverables — and rate their evidence against it. The difference is that for a returner the evidence is unusually good: real performance in your own organisation, not interview answers. Grade it the same way, with the same structure, and the halo has nowhere to operate.
"The best hiring decisions come from having a Cipher designed in advance, and following a structured interview process focused on data, not feelings." — Cipher, ch. 11
Treat departures accordingly. An exit handled with respect — Craig's four-step close applies to exits too — keeps the door open, and a re-recruitment conversation two years later starts warm.
Define the role first — free →
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Frequently asked questions
What does "former employee" mean in recruitment?
Anyone who previously worked for the organisation and left — voluntarily or not — and is now a candidate again. Voluntary leavers in good standing ("boomerang" candidates) are the pool most worth cultivating.
Is it good to rehire former employees?
Often, yes: faster onboarding, known performance, near-zero expectation mismatch. The risk is evaluating them on memory instead of against the actual requirements of the new role — hold them to the same defined standard as any candidate.
Can you rehire someone who was let go?
Sometimes — circumstances and roles change — but the bar is the same question: would they clear this role's requirements on evidence? An involuntary exit makes structured evaluation more necessary, not less.
Sources
- “Top Recruitment Statistics for 2019.” Workonic — as cited in Cipher, ch. 2.
- della Penna, C. HireBest Foundations course — quoted verbatim from the course transcript.
- della Penna, C. Cipher: A Proven Framework to Hire the Best People. Third Act Publishers, 2026.