Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
A pay-analytics CEO rehired one of the five employees she cut in an AI restructuring
Amazon is recruiting laid-off staff again and Deel says its boomerang hires have doubled. In the national data, returners went from 3.1% to 3.4% of US new hires over two years. The measured reversal is 0.3 percentage points.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Business Insider reported on Wednesday that Amazon is trying to recruit back workers it previously laid off, and that other employers are also calling former staff about open roles.
- Maria Colacurcio, chief executive of the pay-intelligence platform Syndio, laid off five employees including labor economists, then concluded weeks later that the company had gotten ahead of itself.
- She has since rehired one of those five employees into a newly created position at the company.
- Revelio Labs found that former employees made up 3.4% of new hires in the US by the end of 2025, up from 3.1% two years earlier.
- Challenger, Gray & Christmas said employers attributed nearly one in four announced job cuts through July to AI, the leading reason cited for the fifth consecutive month.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- decision The Syndio case puts one sequencing choice in front of a manager: cut the specialists now on the expectation the tool arrives, or run the tool alongside them for a quarter and decide with evidence.
- exposure A returning employee takes on the same exposure as before. One engineer in the account went back to Amazon and was cut again five years later.
- constraint A board asking whether its own AI-based cuts went too far cannot settle it with national boomerang rates. Those rates count returning hires; the company's own refill count is what answers the question.
"We moved really fast," Maria Colacurcio told Business Insider [6]. "The technology wasn't quite there yet" [7]. One rehire against five cuts puts a fifth of the eliminated roles back at her company [3].
The redeployment half of her plan failed too. Colacurcio had expected existing employees to move into the new roles she created in the reorg, and few were willing to [8]. A plan that removes domain experts and then staffs the new work through voluntary internal moves needs both bets to land. "One of the things we get wrong is when we assume too quickly that people who are in a certain role can't evolve," she said [9].
A skeptic would say the rising boomerang numbers are ordinary recruiting. Amazon spokesperson Haley Silva said "Rehiring former employees is a normal, long-standing part of how we recruit" [10]. Deel said its boomerang hires more than doubled between 2024 and 2026 [11], and its chief executive Alex Bouaziz gave a reason unrelated to AI: returning staff "understand the company" and "have the right relationships inside of the company to make some things happen faster" [12].
The aggregate move is small. The two-year change in the boomerang share is 0.3 percentage points, a relative increase of about a tenth [1], and returners were still under four in every hundred new US hires at the end of 2025 [2][2]. The two series in circulation also measure different things: Challenger, Gray & Christmas counts announced cuts and their stated reasons [3], Revelio counts hires and prior employment [2]. Business Insider's account does not put a number on how many AI-justified cuts were later refilled.
AI could not yet replace the labor economists Syndio cut, and the company learned that after the people had gone [4][7]. Jonathan Vidales, the employee who came back, joined in 2021 as a pay equity consultant and is now a global account partner [13]. "AI can do a lot of the tedious things," he said. "But human judgment and relationships remain essential," particularly when working directly with customers [14]. He described the return as "sneaking back into the house after I got kicked out" [15].
A rehire also depends on the worker saying yes. Google encouraged Rob Waters to apply for a new role after laying him off last year, and he turned down the eventual offer to pursue his own venture [18]. The layoff, Waters said, "ripped the Band-Aid off" [19].
What to watch
- Whether Revelio's boomerang share keeps climbing past 3.4% in 2026 readings or settles back toward 3.1%.
- Whether AI remains the leading cited reason in Challenger's monthly layoff tallies after the five-month run through July.
- An employer publishing its own count of roles cut for AI and later refilled.