A Fresh Start

That was the title of this slide:

It's from a Baseline slideshow that talks about staffing across the last 6 years and how even though many companies that shrunk their staffs after 2007 have hired since, they haven't necessarily hired the same people back.

That's an interesting statistic to me. It does mean a third of the companies did hire back old staff, which isn't a bad number. In baseball, that's all star territory for hits. If you have some knowledge of the systems, you might get hired back.

However two thirds of the companies did not hire back staff. There could be a number of reasons for this:

• The company is crappy and workers didn't want to come back
• They let the wrong people go, and those people found other jobs
• People already had a job and didn't want to come back to a company that had let them go
• Their skills weren't worth hiring back

There could be other reasons as well. However from the employee standpoint, unless you are in one of the first two categories, you would want the company to make an attempt to hire you back. Especially if you needed a job. It's not that you might need one when the company is hiring right now, but you might need one in five years, and institutional memory can be long. The last thing you want is for your application to be discarded without consideration because of bad feelings or poor performance.

You can't leave every job on your own terms, but you can do a professional job, and ensure that the decision to let you go is a hard one. You can also ensure that if you decide to leave, that they want you back and would hire you back.

The grass isn't always greener on the other side, and having a company that would be happy to hire you back is a great safety net for your career.