What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back? A bad recruiting strategy.

That’s if we’re talking about “boomerang employees,” or US workers who return to a former employer. Boomeranging became a workplace trend in 2022 and 2023, as some workers said they regretted job-hopping during the Great Resignation. While the term may not be in the limelight anymore—Google searches for “boomerang employee” and similar phrases peaked in 2022—data from multiple labor market analytics platforms supplied to HR Brew suggests that boomerang employees, as a trend, are sticking around.

In today’s cooling labor market, boomerang employees can be a boon for recruiters with limited bandwidth and budgets because those returning can require less time and money to recruit and onboard.

“Boomerang employees become really easy to hire in that environment. I don’t need to put you through 13 interviews and a case study, test for culture fit, and all that stuff,” Bob Goodwin, president of Career Club, told HR Brew. “It’s a very streamlined hire in a process that normally has tons of friction.”

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These days, you practically need a crystal ball to predict what will happen next in the labor market.

While the Great Resignation may have felt like a once-in-a-lifetime event, as people moved to new jobs at record-high rates, there’s been some speculation that it could happen again, and soon. However, recruitment experts who spoke with HR Brew had varying opinions about whether that may transpire.

For a second Great Resignation to occur, experts agreed that several things would need to happen: Businesses would need access to more capital, allowing for more hiring, and the labor supply would need to tighten, creating more competition for talent. Some experts that spoke with HR Brew said the combination of low employee engagement and workers sitting tight in a slowing economy suggests employers are sitting on a ticking turnover time bomb. Others believe the Great Resignation was too rare an occurrence to repeat itself.

“There’s a lot of dominoes that have to fall to create a Great Resignation 2.0,” Adam Stafford, CEO of recruitment marketing platform Recruitics, told HR Brew.

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The job market has cooled down more than analysts originally expected this year, but that hasn’t stopped employees from looking for new opportunities.

More workers look to leave. Some 51% of US employees said they were watching for or actively seeking a new job when Gallup surveyed them in May. This represents the highest share of employees expressing a desire to leave their organizations since 2015.

The rising number of employees looking to leave can be explained in part by a period Gallup is calling “the great detachment,” said Ben Wigert, director of research and strategy, workplace management. Record low levels of job satisfaction, connection to the mission and purpose of their organization, and clarity of work expectations are “creating this detachment from the organization, where employees are struggling to navigate the changes and challenges of their everyday work alongside aligning what they do to mission and purpose,” Wigert said. At the same time, there are fewer job opportunities out there for these dissatisfied employees, and “they’re essentially feeling more discontent and stuck than ever,” he added.

How to prevent workers from leaving. Amid this period of heightened worker discontent, there are ways HR can try to prevent their employees from heading for the exit, Wigert said. Of the employees Gallup surveyed who voluntarily left their organizations within the past year, 42% said management could’ve done something to prevent their departure.

Keep reading here.—CV