Joseph T Liu

To mitigate high turnover costs and the uncertain process of socializing replacement employees, many organizations proactively recruit and rehire former employees (i.e., "boomerangs"). The prevailing logic surrounding boomerang employees – which are considered distinct from traditional hires because they are simultaneously impacted by "leave" and "return" factors derived from the same focal organization – is that they require less socialization and adjustment than traditional new hires. Despite the intuitive appeal of this logic, prior work has yet to empirically substantiate the independent and additive influences of "initial stay", "time away", and "return" factors on boomerangs’ return performance. Addressing this omission, we advance and test a tripartite set of theoretically-grounded hypotheses jointly borne from the socialization and turnover literatures. Results indicate that factors from all three phases – "initial stay", "time away", and "return" – are significantly and distinctively predictive of boomerangs’ return performance.