Rehiring former employees gaining momentum in Japan

The number of employees getting rehired in their previous organisations after leaving them is increasing rapidly in Japan, as more employers are willing to offer them new positions.

This is a key finding from a survey conducted by Recruit Holdings, a Japanese global technology company. Surveying 2,761 HR managers at organisations with 30 or more employees, the survey found that despite over half of the respondents (51.1%) relying on the government’s employment service Hello Work over using the organisation’s “alumni network” (12.3%), more respondents (55.5%) were willing to rehire former employees who had either left the company or retired.

These findings indicate that more organisations are using corporate alumni tools to recruit employees. 42.9% of organisations using corporate alumni recruitment were either “fully” or “somewhat” able to secure the needed number of employees, as opposed to 31.6% among organisation that do not make use of former employees.

Furthermore, 34.5% of organisation that have started hiring ex-employees said they were fully or somewhat able to recruit candidates from the resources available, in contrast to the employers that did not make use of the resource pool for recruitment (24.6%), indicating that the success rate of hiring within a pool of ex-employees was high.

READ MORE: Looking to hire? Try turning to former employees

Advantages of hiring ex-employees, as cited by respondents, include better matches between employees and the job description due to prior understanding of the organisation’s business style and philosophies. Respondents also said ex-employees that were re-hired showed a better capability to adapt and adjust to the position quicker, while contributing a wider range of job-related abilities through obtaining new skills and perspectives from other work-experience they may have had, reported Nippon.com.