Business

‘Boomerang’ staffers heading back to the gigs they left

When Alison Williams was 24 years old, she landed a gig as a public relations intern at Hunter Public Relations.

Though the internship was unpaid, she was so thrilled to get it that she promptly moved to New York with, in her words, “a suitcase and a dream.” And it didn’t take long for her to turn that dream into a reality. Once she arrived in the city, she worked so hard that she was quickly promoted to a paid junior account executive, and she continued to kill it at work for the next two years.

But when she was 26, she got a call from a soccer organization in Dallas; they were looking for someone to join their communications department and head up their social media. Was she interested?

Although Williams loved her job and being a 20-something in New York, she felt it was an opportunity she just couldn’t pass up — she was a soccer player in college — so she accepted.

“I was like, ‘I have to do this!’ ” recalls the Upper West Side resident. “Plus, I knew that New York wasn’t going anywhere. I could always come back.”

And she did. Just a year-and-a-half later, Williams wanted to come home. She didn’t love her new job in Dallas: It was very laid-back, and she missed the fast-paced, almost-frenetic nature of agency life in New York.

“It just wasn’t demanding as much of me as I wanted to give to my profession at the time,” she explains.

She was also homesick for New York, so she contacted her old boss at Hunter and asked if there were any openings in Hunter’s lifestyle department, her area of expertise. There weren’t.

Not easily dissuaded, Williams decided to move back anyway. Luckily for her, just one week before she arrived in the city she got a call from Hunter. They’d decided to create a job for her based on her specific skill set, including the communication and social media skills she’d picked up at her job in Dallas. She was offered a new position as a social and digital media strategist.

“Basically, they had needs to be filled, and they put all of them into one new job just for me because they knew my personality and what I could do,” she explains.

And so, just six days after she landed in New York, Williams found herself at Hunter — again.

Williams’ re-hiring is not a freak occurrence. She’s one of many so-called “boomerang staffers” — people who leave their jobs after several years and then return to their old companies all smiles. Experts say more workers are “boomeranging” these days in large part due to today’s job-hopping culture.

“Simply put, turnover rates are high right now. Because of that, people feel more free to take a risk and try something new, because they figure they may end up leaving soon anyway,” explains Bryan Dik, a vocational psychologist and founder of jobzology.com, a site that matches job seekers with meaningful work.

In fact, according to a survey from Future Workplace, a development firm “dedicated to rethinking … the workplace,” 91 percent of millennials expect to stay in a job for fewer than three years — meaning they could have around 20 jobs over the course of their careers.

But what often happens is that once employees arrive at their chosen destination, it’s not all roses and puppies as they’d hoped.

“People only see the negatives of a job once they’re there, so once they see them, they find themselves thinking back to how great they had it at their old gig,” he explains. Cue retreat.

So how does one pull a Williams and make a boomerang status an advantage? The key is to hone in on the new skill you learned at your next job — in Williams’ case, it was her social media expertise — that could potentially give you more leverage at your old one. In other words, Hunter felt confident enough to create a position for her based on her newly-expanded resume.

“When professionals boomerang, they typically return to organizations with enhanced skills and experience. They can use their new skills to market themselves to their employer to gain more benefits and money, and advance their career within the organization,” explains Heather Huhman, a Washington, D.C.-based career expert and author of “Attention Job Seekers: Your Job Search Is At Stake!” Bonus: Being a boomerang staffer shows future employers you were a valued employee and had a positive track record with your previous company, says Huhman.

Cecilia, a 29-year-old Crown Heights resident who wishes to keep her last name private for career purposes, found another way to work the boomerang system: by playing up her loyalty at her old job. After five years working as a sales associate at a sustainable food supplier, she got a new job at a bigger company, because she’d started to feel restless. The problem? She loved her old job’s mission — and wasn’t interested at all in the new product she’d be selling.

“The new job offered more money and had benefits, like a gym membership, so I felt like maybe I should try to make a responsible, mature adult decision and go with it. But I was totally dreading it — I didn’t want to work there at all,” Cecilia explains. On her last day at her old job, she went in for her exit interview and told her boss that she thought it was a shame that she couldn’t start a new specialty produce program at their company, because that was her true passion. “He said, ‘Wait, you want to do that? Get out of your new job! Come back and work for me! I’ll do whatever it takes to get you back!” she recalls.

So Cecilia pre-emptively quit her new job that she’d hated from the start. She called the new company and told them she felt lost and apologized for bailing.

“It was definitely an awkward phone call,” she says, laughing.

Not only did her boss create a new position for her with more responsibility, he also brought her back in at a much higher salary. “He was the one pushing for me to stay. I’d told him that I cared about the company, and that I wanted more responsibility, so he listened and acted on what I’d told him,” she says. “When you’ve been at a place for so long and you’re valued, it makes sense that they would make arrangements to keep you around.”

Erin Hanson, also from Hunter, can attest to that statement. The 38-year-old Upper West Sider worked at Hunter for nine years, then left to go work at a global branding company overseas in Singapore. After five years there, she told her old boss at Hunter that she was ready to return — and they brought her back in as a partner at the agency. “My time in Singapore made me a more well-rounded professional, so I had a different perspective to bring back. That’s how I sold myself to them, and I was right — I feel like I contribute a lot more since I have a different perspective,” Hanson explains.

Going back to your old job doesn’t always guarantee happiness, though. Boomeranging can also make you feel like a bit of a failure.

“There is the risk that if you left your old job thinking you were making an upward move, and it proceeded to not work out, you could end up feeling like you’re taking a step back down by returning, and, thus, beating yourself up a bit,” explains Dik.

That’s what happened to Patrick Fischer, a 30-year-old from Crown Heights. For six years, he worked as a media producer at a strategic marketing agency whose clients were mostly pharmaceutical companies. But although he loved his co-workers — “they were like family,” he says — he wasn’t sure if he wanted to continue on that track. He left to pursue freelance work and figure out what he wanted to do. Unfortunately, he had a hard time getting started, and so when his old boss asked him to come back and help out part-time, with the bonus that he’d get paid by the hour rather than a set rate, he agreed — reluctantly.

“I sort of feel like I’m using my old gig as a crutch, which is not what I set out to do,” Fischer says. “I’m grateful that I have such a nice place to go back to, and the steady money is nice, but I also feel like I am not completing my mission as planned,” he explains.

So how do you beat the feeling of failure? Cut yourself some slack, advises Dik. “Look, you went into a new situation without knowing the full picture, you got there, you saw the full picture, and you weren’t into it. It happens. You can’t blame yourself if you didn’t have the info you have now,” he says.

That’s what Patrick’s trying to do — and it seems to be working well.

“I’m not being too hard on myself right now,” he says. “Instead, I’m trying to just focus on the fact that I get to help people I really care about. I see it as a karma thing. Who knows, maybe down the line, they’ll be able to help me.”