#YourCareer : More People Quit to Take a New Job From an Old Boss. Great & Interesting Read!

The situation can be mutually beneficial to employees and companies. For workers, many have been able to secure a higher salary and a promotion with elevated responsibilities. Employers have the opportunity to bring back proven workers, quickly. This is particularly beneficial now as many companies struggle to fill jobs.

“Employers should be thinking about, ‘OK, in the last two years who left and who would we want back?’ ” said Cammas Freeman, founder of a recruiting firm in Boise, Idaho.

Ms. Freeman said she is increasingly hearing from candidates who were laid off, or otherwise affected by the pandemic, who are considering a return now that the company they left is thriving again.

Victoria Hallas wasn’t dissatisfied with her employer, engineering and design firm WSP Global Inc., WSP 0.35% when she left in June 2020. But the project manager wanted to work on offshore-wind projects, and WSP didn’t have any of those roles at the time. Another engineering firm did. Her new boss also accommodated Ms. Hallas, 32 years old, when she returned to work in January 2021 after the birth of a child and wanted to work part-time for a while.

Still, Ms. Hallas said she felt passed over for leadership opportunities and started job-hunting again over the summer. As she networked, a contact at her old firm asked whether she would be interested in coming back. During negotiations about a new job at WSP, a female executive encouraged her to think carefully about her worth, so she was direct in asking for the offshore-wind role she wanted and was granted a bump in pay and title.

“It felt like a step forward professionally, even though it was going back to an old company,” said Ms. Hallas, who returned to WSP at the end of November.

LinkedIn data shows that boomerang workers have increased across the companies on its platform this year, with tens of thousands more people returning to old employers. Boomerangs accounted for 4.5% of all new hires among companies on the professional networking website in 2021, according to LinkedIn, up from 3.9% over the same period in 2019.

LinkedIn has embraced its own boomerangs this year, with the site doubling the number of new hires who were also former employees compared with 2019. The company has long leveraged its alumni network as a source for hiring and referrals, maintaining an active group for former employees on its platform and extending referral bonuses to alumni. This fall, LinkedIn more deliberately targeted ads for new roles at that group and has actively encouraged alums to return.

Enticing workers back says a lot about what an attractive workplace your company is, said Jennifer Shappley, vice president of global talent acquisition at LinkedIn.

“People who know your culture and have been a part of it who might have gone somewhere else but come back is an important message,” she said.

After one of MuteSix Chief Revenue Officer Greg Gillman’s direct reports resigned this fall, his first instinct was to wonder how a top performer who had left the digital marketing agency earlier this year was enjoying her new job.

When the most recent departure occurred, he was concerned about how long it would take to fill the job, so he reached out to his former report to see whether she was up for chatting about returning to the agency. As it turned out, her new job—which offered her the chance to work in a different field—was good, but not great. Mr. Gillman offered her a bigger role, running a department and managing the company’s partnership channel. She rejoined MuteSix with more pay and a promotion in November.

“If you have a role to fill and you really enjoyed working with someone, reach back out,” he said.

James Nicholson started his career at International Business Machines Corp. IBM -0.19% immediately after graduating from college in the 1990s and moved through the company tackling different sales and marketing roles at IBM’s campus near Toronto for nearly a decade, before leaving to explore other roles in technology. One day this fall he heard about an enticing high-level sales role at IBM; the following day he spoke with a recruiter.

“Deep in my heart, there’s always a soft spot for IBM,” said Mr. Nicholson, who started his new IBM job in November after a 17-year absence. His orientation class of about a dozen new hires included three returning IBM employees. Though he started remotely, he will eventually return to the office where he began his first job.

“It’s going to be like a homecoming kind of experience going back to the hallways where I was in my 20s. I have friends that are still there that I’ve just reached out to on Slack,” he said, joking, “I don’t even know—which part of the cafeteria do they hang out in?”