How many of you are now staying in the same job for more than two or three years? The 'job for life' is fast disappearing. The 'itchy feet' syndrome kicks in far earlier than it ever has before, and people are becoming quicker to assume that the grass really is greener on the other side.
One company, however is making it easy for employees to return back to the fold by keeping in touch with its leavers. Donna Miller, European HR director for Enterprise Rent-A-Car, explains the 'boomerang hire' theory...
In the last 30 months, Enterprise has had 68 boomerang hires – that's more than two every month.
Donna Miller:
Retention is dead, long live the boomerang hire. It’s state the obvious time - one of the key functions of any HR professional is to look after employees. After all, a happy worker is a busy worker. That’s why one of the key measures for the success of any HR strategy has always been retention. It can be very revealing to measure how many of your employees are dissatisfied to the point of packing their bags.So should we still be measuring retention? Does it stand up to the test of time as the best way to measure the success of HR? I don’t think so. Sure, it’s still a very important figure to look at, keep an eye on and do something about if it fluctuates wildly, but I don’t think it’s as relevant as it used to be. Instead, the “boomerang hire” is a measurement much more in keeping with the modern pattern of work.
No, that doesn’t mean measuring how many Antipodeans you hire. It means tracking how many people leave your company for somewhere else, only to rejoin again. How many people have discovered the grass isn’t greener and come back to where they were happiest?
Measuring the number of boomerang hires helps to give a good picture of how successful your HR is, while allowing for the inevitable modern-day career nomads. The returning employee is every bit as big a compliment to your brand and HR strategy as the retained employee, and may even have picked up extra training and skills in their time away.
Keeping in touch with your best employees after they leave is something far too few companies do. Looking after your current employees is of course priority number one, but with so many people regularly switching jobs today, making sure you get your fair share of boomerang hires is more important than ever.
The CIPD 2007 Recruitment, Retention and Turnover Survey reveals that:
Change of career is deemed to be the most common cause of voluntary turnover (52%). Other reasons include promotion outside the organisation (47%), level of pay (39%) and lack of career development opportunities (39%).
