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By DAVE SIMANOFF, Tampa Tribune
TAMPA - Some people claim to have the world on a string. Professional headhunter Dan Smith has a career on a bungee cord.
Twice, Smith has left Princeton Search Group LLC: once to try his hand at running his own one-man executive search firm, and once to pursue an opportunity with a competing firm that he politely declines to name. Both times he has sprung back to Princeton Search, most recently moving from the Midwest to Tampa to head up the firm's local office.
The reason? Smith really enjoys working for Princeton.
"It's not that I wasn't successful but that I wasn't nearly as happy,'' he said.
As companies' needs and workers' expectations change in this rapidly evolving economy, one of the cardinal rules of employment {mdash} the one that says people can't go back to a former employer {mdash} has been tossed out the window. A growing number of professionals, such as Smith, are finding themselves welcomed back to the companies that they had left just a few years earlier.
The boomerang trend, as it's called, is a relatively new phenomenon that began to appear in the 1990s as the emerging dot-coms encouraged people to "jump around more'' in their careers, said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Chicago-based Challenger Gray & Christmas Inc., a firm that tracks workplace trends.
"Today, it's really quite accepted, and it's happening more and more all the time,'' he said.
Analysts say there are no firm numbers on how many people bounce back to former employers.
Boomerangers bring back to a company all of the institutional knowledge they amassed while working there, in addition to all of the new information learned from other employers, Challenger said.
That knowledge "'really is a valuable asset that you bring back a company: you really do know the organization, its culture, many of the people,'' he said. "It makes you more valuable than other candidates.''
The trend has implications for both workers and employers, Challenger said. Workers shouldn't burn bridges when they leave a company, and employers should strive to create the kind of working environment that people should want to return to.
Lawyer Seth Rodner said his positive experience as a young law school graduate at Tampa-based Fowler White Boggs Banker in the 1990s helped persuade him to return to the firm in 2003 to help build its new white-collar crime and government investigations group.
Rodner left the firm after three years to become a federal prosecutor with the Department of Justice in Washington. He then joined a private law firm in Boston.
"I never really thought that when I left Florida originally I'd come back,'' he said. When the opportunity at Fowler White Boggs Banker arose, ``I kept thinking about how much I liked the people, how much I enjoyed the collegiality and the culture. I realized all over again what a nice place to practice law it was.''
By hiring a boomeranger, Fowler White Boggs Banker gets a familiar employee with a lot of new expertise.
"I have a chance to do some things that I could not have done if I had stayed here and progressed through the ranks,'' Rodner said.
'Grass Isn't Always Greener'
At Raymond James Financial in St. Petersburg, Kim Gibbs knows firsthand how attractive a good working environment can be.
Gibbs left Raymond James in 1999 because she didn't like the lengthy commute from Brandon to St. Petersburg, but subsequent jobs in Tampa felt unfulfilling. After two years she moved to South Florida and didn't find a job she liked there either.
"It tore my heart to leave [Raymond James], but it was sometimes a two-hour commute,'' she said.
Last summer, fed up with jobs she didn't like, she called her old boss at Raymond James. Three weeks later, she had a new position as an administrative manager in the firm's legal department.
"There's just this incredible energy here: Everybody works real hard, but it's just a really fun place to work,'' she said. "The grass isn't always greener on the other side.''
Gibbs remembers going through orientation for the second time.
"It was kind of weird because I already knew the history of Raymond James. I knew the lingo. I knew a lot of people,'' she said. But there was plenty of new information for her to learn, she said, and the company had grown so much in the time she was gone that it had added a fourth office tower to its campus.
Barbara Galloway, Raymond James' managing partner for human resources, said boomerangers have brought institutional knowledge and fresh perspectives to the firm.
"A lot of times when you leave a firm, you get a variety of other experience,'' she said. "What you bring back is new ideas, new ways of doing things.''
Raymond James has several boomerangers on staff. Galloway said they left the company for a variety of reasons: Some moved away from the area, and others started at Raymond James right out of college and left to pursue other opportunities.
"They are good employees before they leave, and they are good employees when they come back {mdash} and they're usually very happy to be back,'' Galloway said. "It's home. It's comfortable.''
People To Share Success With
Smith, the managing partner at Princeton Search, said the boomerang trend shows that people aren't just looking for money and titles in their careers.
He returned to Princeton Search the first time after realizing that working on his own wasn't as rewarding as working in a team.
"The fun part of business is sharing success,'' he said. "On your own, it doesn't exist. There's nobody to high-five with. There's nobody to tell you what a great job you did. There's no culture. You miss that.''
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Boomerangers: There And Back Again
May 8, 2005
By DAVE SIMANOFF, Tampa Tribune
TAMPA - Some people claim to have the world on a string. Professional headhunter Dan Smith has a career on a bungee cord.
Twice, Smith has left Princeton Search Group LLC: once to try his hand at running his own one-man executive search firm, and once to pursue an opportunity with a competing firm that he politely declines to name. Both times he has sprung back to Princeton Search, most recently moving from the Midwest to Tampa to head up the firm's local office.
The reason? Smith really enjoys working for Princeton.
"It's not that I wasn't successful but that I wasn't nearly as happy,'' he said.
As companies' needs and workers' expectations change in this rapidly evolving economy, one of the cardinal rules of employment {mdash} the one that says people can't go back to a former employer {mdash} has been tossed out the window. A growing number of professionals, such as Smith, are finding themselves welcomed back to the companies that they had left just a few years earlier.
The boomerang trend, as it's called, is a relatively new phenomenon that began to appear in the 1990s as the emerging dot-coms encouraged people to "jump around more'' in their careers, said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Chicago-based Challenger Gray & Christmas Inc., a firm that tracks workplace trends.
"Today, it's really quite accepted, and it's happening more and more all the time,'' he said.
Analysts say there are no firm numbers on how many people bounce back to former employers.
Boomerangers bring back to a company all of the institutional knowledge they amassed while working there, in addition to all of the new information learned from other employers, Challenger said.
That knowledge "'really is a valuable asset that you bring back a company: you really do know the organization, its culture, many of the people,'' he said. "It makes you more valuable than other candidates.''
The trend has implications for both workers and employers, Challenger said. Workers shouldn't burn bridges when they leave a company, and employers should strive to create the kind of working environment that people should want to return to.
Lawyer Seth Rodner said his positive experience as a young law school graduate at Tampa-based Fowler White Boggs Banker in the 1990s helped persuade him to return to the firm in 2003 to help build its new white-collar crime and government investigations group.
Rodner left the firm after three years to become a federal prosecutor with the Department of Justice in Washington. He then joined a private law firm in Boston.
"I never really thought that when I left Florida originally I'd come back,'' he said. When the opportunity at Fowler White Boggs Banker arose, ``I kept thinking about how much I liked the people, how much I enjoyed the collegiality and the culture. I realized all over again what a nice place to practice law it was.''
By hiring a boomeranger, Fowler White Boggs Banker gets a familiar employee with a lot of new expertise.
"I have a chance to do some things that I could not have done if I had stayed here and progressed through the ranks,'' Rodner said.
'Grass Isn't Always Greener'
At Raymond James Financial in St. Petersburg, Kim Gibbs knows firsthand how attractive a good working environment can be.
Gibbs left Raymond James in 1999 because she didn't like the lengthy commute from Brandon to St. Petersburg, but subsequent jobs in Tampa felt unfulfilling. After two years she moved to South Florida and didn't find a job she liked there either.
"It tore my heart to leave [Raymond James], but it was sometimes a two-hour commute,'' she said.
Last summer, fed up with jobs she didn't like, she called her old boss at Raymond James. Three weeks later, she had a new position as an administrative manager in the firm's legal department.
"There's just this incredible energy here: Everybody works real hard, but it's just a really fun place to work,'' she said. "The grass isn't always greener on the other side.''
Gibbs remembers going through orientation for the second time.
"It was kind of weird because I already knew the history of Raymond James. I knew the lingo. I knew a lot of people,'' she said. But there was plenty of new information for her to learn, she said, and the company had grown so much in the time she was gone that it had added a fourth office tower to its campus.
Barbara Galloway, Raymond James' managing partner for human resources, said boomerangers have brought institutional knowledge and fresh perspectives to the firm.
"A lot of times when you leave a firm, you get a variety of other experience,'' she said. "What you bring back is new ideas, new ways of doing things.''
Raymond James has several boomerangers on staff. Galloway said they left the company for a variety of reasons: Some moved away from the area, and others started at Raymond James right out of college and left to pursue other opportunities.
"They are good employees before they leave, and they are good employees when they come back {mdash} and they're usually very happy to be back,'' Galloway said. "It's home. It's comfortable.''
People To Share Success With
Smith, the managing partner at Princeton Search, said the boomerang trend shows that people aren't just looking for money and titles in their careers.
He returned to Princeton Search the first time after realizing that working on his own wasn't as rewarding as working in a team.
"The fun part of business is sharing success,'' he said. "On your own, it doesn't exist. There's nobody to high-five with. There's nobody to tell you what a great job you did. There's no culture. You miss that.''
Executive Search | Recruitment Process Outsourcing | Contract Staffing | College Recruiting | Site Map
This site is optimized for 1024x768 resolution and Internet Explorer.
Copyright © 2010 PrincetonOne