Ford has hired back 350 veteran engineers over the past three years after automated inspection systems missed design and quality defects that experienced staff would have caught.
Analysts and reporters have started calling the pattern the “AI boomerang,” and Ford isn’t an isolated case. Robert Half research shows that 3 in 10 employers eliminated positions after implementing AI, then later added those roles back. A related breakdown of the survey put the figure at nearly a third (32%) of hiring managers, with finance, tech and HR reporting the highest rates.
Visier’s analysis of 2.4 million employees across 142 companies found the overall rehire rate after layoffs sits at about 5.3%, a pattern the firm says has shown up for years.
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AI restructuring with an ‘easy button’
Peter D. Banko, president and CEO of Baystate Health and author of The Necessary Goodbye: How Great Leaders Fire with Clarity, Confidence and Compassion, has spent nearly two decades running large health systems. HR Executive asked him why experienced employees, the ones with institutional knowledge, tend to be first out the door in an AI restructuring.
“The ‘easy button’ in restructuring is to target high-salary line-items to drastically cut costs,” Banko says. “The ‘real button’ to push here is to use this as an opportunity to address the team members who don’t perform (bad attitudes, behaviors and relationships) and don’t deliver the necessary results.”
That distinction reframes what went wrong at companies now rehiring, since a miscalibrated bet on what AI can do shouldn’t serve as a shortcut for an evaluation of who was actually adding value.
CHRO Daniela Seabrook, whose Adecco Group surveyed 2,000 C-suite executives across 13 countries earlier this year, sees the same shortcut from the workforce-planning side. Her research found that only 36% of leaders say their talent strategy clearly demonstrates how AI creates opportunity for employees, and just 39% are involving employees directly in redesigning their own jobs. Only 22% feel confident their organization is building future-ready skills at all.
“The best way to avoid rehiring as a correction mechanism is to slow down the decision before the cut,” Seabrook told HR Executive. She recommends leaders ask a short set of questions before a role is eliminated: which tasks are genuinely automatable, what happens to the rest of the role if only part of it is, what expertise disappears if the role goes entirely and whether the role could be redesigned or redeployed instead of removed.
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What convinces someone to boomerang?
Research on the trend suggests most companies are rehiring for a vacated role rather than winning back the specific person who held it. But what would make someone who was let go say yes to coming back?
Seabrook points to transparency as the entry price. “Employees will likely need evidence that their employer has learned from past decisions and has identified where AI is best suited as well as where human capabilities remain critical,” she says. She ties this to Adecco’s Global Workforce of the Future research, which found that 99% of workers who feel a strong sense of purpose day to day plan to stay with their employer over the next 12 months, compared with 53% of those who never feel it.
Banko locates the same trust question earlier in the process, at the moment of departure rather than the moment of return. “How an individual leaves an organization is more important than the hiring and onboarding process,” he says. “The team members remaining watch, listen and heavily scrutinize the goodbye more than hello. You rebuild hiring credibility with goodbyes that are kind, empathetic, supportive, communicated with crystal clarity.”
That point lands with particular weight given what Ford itself has said about the return of its veteran engineers. Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told Bloomberg the company had let go of its most experienced people before their knowledge could be used to train the AI systems replacing them. The people watching that decision, and the ones who eventually got the call to come back, are the same audience Banko and Seabrook are describing.
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Discipline before layoffs
Forrester’s research forecasts that roughly half of AI‑attributed layoffs will be rehired. Banko was asked what warning signs precede that kind of regret, and his answer centers on ego rather than analysis. “Cutting roles is the most important decision a leader will make in their careers,” he says. “The warning signs about ‘being right’ are prioritizing your ego, defending your beliefs, winning debates and maintaining immovable positions. Getting it right requires placing the organization first, listening, learning, adapting and, yes, even changing your mind and direction.”
Seabrook argues leaders need to shift from headcount planning to skill-based planning, building internal mobility into how roles change as AI is adopted rather than treating headcount reduction as the default response to any automation gain. Companies like IKEA franchisee Ingka Group offer a version of this already in practice. Rather than cutting call center jobs after its Billie chatbot began resolving 47% of inbound inquiries, Ingka reskilled 8,500 agents into remote interior design consultants, a channel that had already reached 1.3 billion euros in sales, about 3.3% of total revenue, with a stated goal of growing that share to 10%.
Who gets rehired?
Visier’s data also points to who gets rehired most often. It found that high performers return at a 120% higher rate than mid and low performers; managers return at a 68% higher rate than individual contributors; and employees with 10 to 15 years of tenure return at a 42% higher rate than other tenure groups, the same institutional-knowledge profile Banko and Poon both described losing.
Boomerang hires also come back more expensive, at an average 5% pay increase versus 2% for employees who stayed, which Visier estimates cost the finance industry alone about $19 million in 2024. “The biggest risk for organizations today is not moving too slowly on AI; it is moving too quickly without a people strategy in place,” Seabrook says.
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