We have a semi-no rehire policy for our company. The rehire policy indicates, in general, that any employee (we call them associates) who leaves our company, voluntarily or involuntarily, will not be hired back.

Our policy is not intended to be a sledgehammer directed to individuals who are seeking career opportunity elsewhere. Nor is it intended to be an incentive for staying. It is more a validation of practical observations made over the years.

I don’t know how most other companies treat their rehire policy. However, in my experiences in the past 20 years since the time that I got out of law school and began managing the first retail sporting goods store that my father and I had opened, my experience has always been that rehires never work.

They just don’t pan out when they are hired back.

People leave a company’s employment for lots of reasons.

They leave because of personal things happening in their lives. They leave because there was some type of conflict with their direct supervisor that, in their minds, forced them to go elsewhere. They leave because they weren’t given the appreciation or income they believe they deserved. And those are all on the voluntary separation side. There are any number of reasons for involuntary separation.

Even when those particular circumstances have gone or passed, it doesn’t seem to matter. For example, the personal circumstances got cleared up or their direct supervisor was separated or transferred themselves or the job market validated the income level the associate was making when they left. Regardless of whether those circumstances clear up, when they ultimately come back, it just doesn’t last.

The process is so very typical. They send a letter or call. We ask them to put in writing why they want to come back and what will be different for them this time if they are allowed to come back. And, after we put them through several interviews and focus on the longevity component of them sticking with the company this time, in some instances we brought them back and in other instances we didn’t.

No matter what, I can personally count in some 20 plus years, the number of associates who managed to make it, the second time around, more than a year, and only one person in my entire history is still here after having left once.

Our rehire policy was brought to mind just the other day because we had a very good marketer who had served well for several years when he was with us, who reapplied for the position. We had several executives in the company including the person who would have been his direct supervisor, the VP in charge of that department, and our VP of Organizational Development, all ask for an exception to our rehire policy. I permitted the exception, and we extended a job offer to him. Because of the good working relationship we had with him and the very decent person he was, the person who used to be his direct supervisor spoke to him about making sure this is what he really wanted to do or was it simply going to be a stop gap measure until he found something else to do.

After thinking about it over the weekend, he called and admitted that what he was really trying to do is to capture the feeling he had at the time he worked in our organization. In truth, being a marketer is not really what he wanted to do any more after all. Therefore, out of respect for us, and appreciation for the job offer and candid conversation, he declined.

It got me thinking again about the rehire policy and why it works on a broader level.

All of us have had experiences in our lives when we attempt to revisit the past in some way. An old relationship which we try to resurrect. Going back to our Alma Mater—high school or college— to look for those haunting memories in the shadows and corners of the campus. We try to recreate feelings of friendship with friends we once spent massive amounts of time with. We revisit a place we visited on some vacation that retained a special place in our hearts and minds ever since.

But in each of those cases, we always somehow come up short, don’t we?

I remember studying in Rome in 1985. We used to take weekend trips to all the surrounding places. I remember visiting this wonderful Umbrian town called Todi. It was fantastic. It was a landscape painting. It was as if nature could never have produced something as beautiful as the painting that I saw against the hillside of medieval Italy. But it was real. And it was there. And I got it. And I felt it.

When I revisited Umbria on a quick trip to Italy with Janet this past February, I sat in the same spot I had sat some 16 years ago, savoring the espresso I had waited so long to encounter. But it just wasn’t the same. Janet could see it… in my eyes and in my face. It just wasn’t the same.

I don’t know why it is so very difficult to go home. I don’t know why it is so very difficult to recreate an event that once was so significant in our lives. Maybe it’s simply because the one constant we have in life is change. Yes, of course, we change but so does everything else… all the time.

Is it possible that it is just impossible to ever be close enough again to the feeling we had for us to recognize it when we feel it again? Or is it possible that it is just impossible to ever find in the past what is real for us in the present.

Kevin, I am sorry in a way you will not be rejoining us. But at the same time I understand, in a big way, why Kevin it could never be. As much as we all want, as much as we all would like, we simply cannot go home.

Original writing date: September 2001

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 8:50 am and is filed under Business, Business Rules, Dynetech, Larry Pino, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.