A strong performer resigns for a competitor, and eighteen months later she applies to come back. Her former manager wants to rehire her at a higher level and salary. Then HR finds the notes from her exit interview: complaints about that same manager, written down informally and never investigated. Jill Gawrych, CHRO at Springs Window Fashions, worked through this case with host Rebecca Taylor on HR Voices.
The scenario is fabricated, but most HR leaders have lived some version of it. A boomerang employee rehire is usually an easy yes. This one is not. Rehiring puts her back under the manager she named; declining her could look like punishment for a protected complaint. Her answer was a sequence: stop the process, find out what happened, and run the review that should have happened the first time.
Why Every Option in This Case Carries Risk
Jill was blunt about the starting position. The company cannot bring the candidate back without risk, and it cannot turn her away without risk either. The longer gap makes it worse. A complaint looked at three weeks after a resignation still has its facts close at hand. One looked at eighteen months later does not.
The legal exposure points both ways. EEOC guidance on retaliation treats complaining to management about discrimination as likely protected activity, and it lists refusal to hire among the materially adverse actions. A quiet “no” is not a safe choice.
Retaliation is also the most common basis in charges filed with the agency. In fiscal year 2025 it appeared in 54,350 of 88,201 charges, according to EEOC enforcement statistics.
Jill flagged a second front that is easy to miss. If HR now acts against the manager over a complaint it never looked into, the manager “might actually claim retaliation of some sort as well.” Both sides of this case carry workplace retaliation exposure.
What Eighteen Months of Silence Does to the Facts
Rebecca raised the problem of memory. The only record is a set of informal notes, and asking people to recall events from a year and a half ago invites gaps and guesswork. Jill added the harder truth: once HR has seen those notes, there is no plausible deniability left. Nobody can say the company did not know.
The first question Jill asks is not about the candidate. It is about her own team. She goes to the HR people who took the notes and asks what the exit conversation looked like and whether anything was done with it. From there, she says, “it becomes two different paths.” One path resolves this case. The other finds where her HR process broke down, so the same gap does not open again.
She also draws a line between two kinds of manager problems. The test is whether the conduct was “unethical or is it just bad leadership.” Bad leadership is a longer-term coaching problem. Unethical conduct is closer to “a lawsuit waiting to happen.” Turnover on the manager’s team is one of the first things Jill checks.
Jill avoids assumptions in both directions. HR should not assume the manager was wrong because a complaint exists, and it should not assume the departing employee was wrong because she left. Both agreed on the discipline underneath that: setting aside the unconscious bias that shapes judgment about people HR already likes or distrusts.
What Actually Works
Make the First Fast Move a Full Stop
Jill describes herself as biased for action, and the first fast move she wants is a stop. “All right, everybody, just stop.” Nobody talks to the candidate yet. She would “absolutely pause the hiring of that position,” both for this candidate and for anyone else. The risk of waiting is that the manager calls the candidate first and makes a promise HR has to unwind.
Design the Conversation Order With the Candidate Last
The order matters. HR comes first, then the manager, handled carefully. Jill does not open by telling the manager they were named eighteen months ago. She asks why they want this person back and listens. Then she talks to the team.
Once the picture is clearer, she brings in her employment attorney as a thought partner and maps out how each person might respond before the calls happen. The candidate conversation comes almost last, and that is when the investigation formally opens. If something unexpected surfaces in any of these talks, Jill acknowledges it, pauses the conversation, and regroups rather than improvising.
Treat Every Boomerang Like Any Other Candidate
Jill is a boomerang hire herself, and she is not against rehiring. Her point is that a returning employee gets the same scrutiny as a stranger. HR should ask what happened while they worked there, why they left, and why they want to come back. Reference checks with former colleagues apply here too. The failure mode, in her view, is hiring someone back because it is easy rather than because it is a good choice.
Where Employee Relations Fits
This case only exists because a departing employee’s exit interview produced a complaint that went nowhere. Jill treats exit interviews and open survey comments as risk information HR should read once it has asked for it.
A former CHRO taught her to write a memo on every complaint: what HR did, what it found, and the basis for the conclusion. Jill admits, “I hated those memos.” She now calls them her best friend, because everyone works from the same record and it can always be pulled back up.
Rebecca noted how often ER records live in spreadsheets and shared docs, hard to find after staff changes. Keeping every concern in one place with HR case management gives an exit complaint an owner and a closing note. Teams that skip that step tend to repeat common workplace investigation mistakes under time pressure. Another HR Voices case starts the same way, with an exit interview that exposed a toxic top performer.
Frequently Asked Questions About Rehiring a Boomerang Employee
It can, if the decision is tied to a protected complaint. EEOC guidance lists refusal to hire as a materially adverse action. That is why Jill pauses the process and looks into the old complaint before anyone makes the hiring decision.
Yes. In this episode, the investigation is treated as the one step that is not optional. A complaint does not stop mattering because the person who raised it resigned, and a closed file protects the company when the issue resurfaces.
Start inside HR. Jill begins with the team members who took the original notes, then speaks with the manager carefully, then the wider team. The candidate comes near the end, once HR understands what it is dealing with.
It depends on what the investigation finds. Jill separates poor leadership from unethical conduct. The first may be workable with coaching; the second means the candidate should not return to that manager to be treated the same way.
Read exit interview notes and document why each person left. Then treat a returning candidate like any other: check references, ask what happened during their first stint, and confirm why they want to come back.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Jill’s framing holds even though the case has no clean answer. She would not want to be a candidate walking into an investigation. But “neither would I want to be a candidate where the company did not take my words seriously enough.” The company missed something eighteen months ago. Now that it knows, the fix is to do the investigation it skipped, in a deliberate order, before anyone makes a hiring decision. Jill Gawrych’s broader point is that the right HR people are “there for the people,” and that includes the person who complained on the way out.
See how AllVoices helps HR teams close the loop on every complaint, including the ones raised at exit.
