For most of the twentieth century, going back was an admission. It meant the new thing hadn't worked, and it usually meant taking the old job on the old terms with a slightly awkward first week.

The number that ended that idea comes from Anthony Klotz and three colleagues at the people-analytics firm Visier, writing in Harvard Business Review in 2023. Working through more than 3 million employment records across 129 companies, they found returners making up more than a quarter of all new hires — not an exception in the hiring mix but a substantial fraction of it.

And the timing is remarkably consistent. Visier's own data puts the typical return at around 13 months. Long enough to have genuinely tried the other thing. Short enough that your login probably still works and nobody has redistributed your projects permanently.

What produced the visible wave was the Great Resignation — 47.8 million US resignations recorded in 2021. Separately, a six-country survey of around 4,000 workers found nearly 20% of pandemic-era quitters had already gone back to the employer they left.

The economics are more interesting than the etiquette. A boomerang costs the employer two full transactions — an exit and a rehire, with recruitment, notice period, lost institutional knowledge and onboarding on both legs — to end up approximately where they began, minus a year. For the worker, it is frequently the fastest available raise, because leaving and returning re-prices you at market, and internal raises rarely do.

Which means the round trip is not irrational on either side. It is what happens when the only reliable way to be repriced is to leave the building.

The metaphor is honest about one thing that most workplace vocabulary hides. A boomerang returns because someone threw it. The word concedes, quietly, that the exit was never the clean break either side described at the time.