5 Reasons Why You Should Explore Hiring Former Employees

Over the past two years, as Dyn continues its wild adventure improving Internet Performance, we’ve needed to fill hundreds of new jobs. With any high growth startup, hiring the best talent is no easy task.  Sure, like other companies, we have many options. We’ve experimented with contract recruiters, thrown open houses with colleges and universities, networked at conferences, built a really solid in-house Talent Acquisition team, and even acquired a few companies for the sake of their talent.

Like any company, Dyn’s culture is really unique, and not everyone can blossom here forever. Over the past 15 years, as the company continues to double itself, the culture continues to change. Employees 1-30’s personalities are different than 250-300’s. As new talent joins, Dyn’s culture evolves, and so does the talent internally. Dyn can’t possibly keep everyone on staff. People come, get experience, and move forward with their careers, even if it means working elsewhere.

Culture evolves as companies grow. Jason Hutchins (above), an early Dyn employee, continuing his longtime tradition of passing out donuts to colleagues on Fridays. 

It’s only natural that the longer a company is around, the longer the list of former employees continues to grow. People always say it’s important to never burn a bridge. We’ve found one technique that has worked really well for hiring at Dyn: Hiring former employees or, as many are calling them, boomerang employees. Here is why you should seriously explore hiring former employees. 

1. Boomerang employees are faster to hire.

 According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2014, it took  an average of 25 workdays (that’s five weeks) to fill an open position at a smaller company. At companies larger than 5000 employees or more, it took 58 workdays.

One of the slowest parts of the hiring process is understanding an applicant's skillset, and determining if they’d be a good cultural fit. At Dyn, there’s resume screening, vetting with a phone interview, scheduling an in person interview, meeting with the hiring manager, meeting with a team, salary negotiations, and finally an offer. These meetings are especially hard to complete when your candidate is juggling their current employer’s schedule.

With boomerang candidates, they often times already know members of the teams they’ll be working with. If a hiring manager is new,  they can ask current employees how they’d fit culturally, before they meet with him or her. This also gives the hiring manager more time to assess their skillsets, and ask about what skills they’ve learned during their time away from Dyn.  

Lastly, unintentionally, we often keep former Dyn employees in our social lives. It’s rare that one of our 400+ employees isn’t emailing, tweeting, or grabbing lunch with people they used to work with everyday. This makes it easier for them to discover openings, just through conversations.  Ultimately, hiring former employees is a faster process, and eliminates a lot of the guess work with hiring.

2. Boomerangs coming back can boost morale.

Everytime someone leaves Dyn, as much as we like seeing our employees advance and be successful, for selfish reasons, it’s still a bummer. Employees leaving Dyn can be just as stressful for those staying as those who depart. Seeing team members leave can heavily affect morale. New employees can definitely boost morale, but bringing back familiar faces can create an even bigger boost.  As we’ve explored bringing back old talent,  we’re calling the morale boost the Band is Getting Back Together Effect.

A good example of this is Alex Lessard, our talented and beloved Sr. Manager of Release and Automation Engineering.  During his first round with Dyn, Lessard helped Dyn scale our DNS products a few years back as Director of DNS Performance and Optimization.

Alex Lessard (pictured above) in one of Dyn's marketing videos running with a router during his first round at Dyn. 

Back when Lessard was a manager, the engineering and product teams were one and the same.He was a talented leader on the engineering team, working closely with many core members on product and engineering. He also mentored many junior engineers who were working with Dyn as their first jobs out of school.

As Dyn’s products and teams grew however, there was some necessary restructuring that led to the product and engineering teams turning into two different teams, leading to his departure.

Last summer, after spending a few more years successfully on the product development side at a company called MobileFuse, we saw an opportunity to bring him back. Lessard coming back has helped re-energize both engineering and product teams. His experiences with both the product and engineering operations help make releases seamless. He’s a perfect fit for this new role, and ultimately made many people happier at Dyn.

Overall, change is not always a comfortable thing for employees to go through, and can hurt morale. Bringing back former employees can have an inverse effect.

3. Boomerang employees onboard faster.

One of the biggest growing pains we faced at Dyn over the past 10 years with talent was onboarding. We learned this with employee feedback, and built a great training team and unique program for each department.

This point may seem really obvious, but think about it from this perspective. Earlier we mentioned it takes an average 5 work weeks to fill a position. At Dyn, even with our improved onboarding process, it typically takes at least 90 days for an employee to be considered fully “onboarded.” We have certain goals we want to hit each year, and new hires lose almost 115 days between hiring and onboarding.

“Most boomerang employees typically onboard more than 50% faster than new hires.” -Marissa Sterl,  Senior Training Designer.  

A good example of this would be Email Reputation Manager, Josh Nason.

Nason came to Dyn originally from an acquisition of the company SendLabs back in early 2011. We acquired SendLabs to better serve our customers’ Internet Performance in email delivery. Knowing how to get millions of emails delivered for companies is no easy task, and the SendLabs team knew how to do it best.

Josh Nason (above) during his first round at Dyn giving a video office tour back in 2012. 

Being at a small company, Nason handled all things involving marketing, account management, and support of their customer base. He also spent many hours working with Stephen Wheeler, our Director of Deliverability, learning all the tricks and best practices to get emails delivered for customers.

SendLabs spent a lot of their marketing strategy on educating the marketplace about safe email sending, and ways to avoid unintentionally becoming a spammer. This effort was spearheaded by Nason’s content strategy.

During his first round at Dyn, Nason ran our Content Marketing Team. After spending many years at Dyn, he decided  he was looking for a change, and left to join Pixel Media as a Marketing Strategist.  

This past year, with more customers needing help with email delivery, it was time for Stephen Wheeler to expand his team. This position was super difficult to fill, and a few quarters went by before finally thinking of Nason.  This is because getting millions of emails out for customers is super complicated, and really requires a lot of familiarity with best practices, rules with email delivery, keeping an email list clean, etc. When the idea to bring Nason back was first brought up, there was no looking back.

Our SVP of Customer Experience, Matt Toy has been pleased with the quick turnaround time.

“With his previous knowledge of our systems and approach, Josh was able to hit the ground running and help customers almost right out of the gate.” - Matt Toy

Whether it’s a technical job, or something that requires just understanding the company structure, having that head start can make it way easier to hit company goals.

4. Boomerang employees can learn new skills and perspective  from outside companies.

Naturally as startups grow, employees become more specialized in one area. A network engineer who a year ago focused on keeping our network operations afloat, may shift into being specialized in network capacity.  A sales rep that focused on bringing new business and account management twoyears ago may specialize now on helping the current roster of customers. Specialization is what naturally happens as companies grow.  

According to the Wall Street Journal, the median job tenure for workers ages 20-24 is shorter than 16 months, and 3 years for ages 25-34.  Though that time period may seem short, boomerangs can learn a lot in a short period of time. Going to a new company, one of our former employees can get certain security certifications, learn to code in a new language, use different technology and vendors, or even just get a new perspective they would have never had the opportunity to learn at Dyn.

For example,  one of our first boomerang employees was Tom Denniston, an early Account Rep on the sales team during his first round at Dyn. Denniston had taken an interest in startups, and after succeeding for a few years at Dyn, left to go join one.

Tom Denniston (above) serenades customers with his musical skills, singing about Dyn's origin story prior to leaving to join another startup.  

Mill33 was a startup that helped companies with email delivery, while leveraging Dyn’s email delivery technology  for inbox placement. They were a very close email partner of Dyn’s. Denniston ran and managed their sales team. Mill33 had to figure out it’s pricing strategies, positioning for sales, and most of all, what companies need on the email delivery front. This led to deals being super flexible, and different as the company was learning.

“Working at startup, I got a chance to work on some super complicated deals that required a lot of legal back and forth, and negotiations that I wouldn’t have had if I stayed at Dyn,” - Tom Denniston 

In 2013, when Dyn’s Strategic Partner team was quickly expanding,  it made sense to bring back Denniston.  Our partner deals can sometimes be complicated. They typically leverage our technology in unorthodox ways. This requires a lot of customizing and negotiations in the sales process when putting strategic partnerships together. It also takes some understanding on when to involve our legal team.

Denniston was ultimately successful in his second round at Dyn, but another asset he brought leaving Dyn was a new perspective. Since Mill33 was an email partner of Dyn’s, he learned what companies in Dyn’s partner program go through.  He learned what their biggest problems are, what’s the best ways to integrate with Dyn’s technology. In essence, he became the customer.  

Denniston recently left to join another startup, but his perspective invaluably helped scale the partner team further.

Leaving a company can introduce former employees to all kinds of experiences, give them opportunity for personal growth, and ultimately patch them into becoming even better if they come back.

5. Boomerang employees are great for company culture.

Let’s face it, no matter how great a company is, there are employees who just don’t fit into the company culture. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but a necessary one to bring up.

Through our journey at Dyn, we could spend hours analyzing where things go wrong. Maybe your employees worked too independently, didn’t like their managers, were in the wrong role, weren’t onboarded correctly, or didn’t relate with their colleagues.  Everyone’s different. They have different backgrounds, motivations, passions, and skills. Taking those differences and figuring out how to create a quilt of harmony out of them is an art form.

When an employee leaves a company, many in leadership may have a negative perspective on him or her, and their impact on company culture. They could question if this person is loyal? Were they unhappy, and did they make others unhappy because of it?  How passionate were they about your company’s mission? Are they just out to get the biggest paycheck?

Leaving a company is a pretty big risk, and one that is very complicated.  It’s also very emotional.  We spend at least 35% of our waking life at work.. Often times there are stories that aren’t told when employees leave. Many people leave a company because another opportunity just lines up better with what they want at that point in their life. Timing is everything.

One thing we’ve noticed however, is that employees who come back tend to be an even better cultural fit the second time around.

Maybe it’s  a “Grass is Always Greener” mentality where they need to go elsewhere to realize how happy they are with their old employer.  Other times, it may just be the timing of culture for some employees. Some people work better at a company with 30 people, while others work better at a company with 400.

The best part about boomerang employees leaving and then coming back is the part when he or she realizes they want to come back. This process actually filters out a lot of the bad cultural fits at Dyn. Those who voiced a heavy dissatisfaction working at Dyn probably would never consider working here again.

An old group photo of some of Dyn's Nerf gun enthusiast, featuring both current and former employees at Dyn. 

We want employees who are passionate, understand our mission, love and respect their teammates, work hard, and are constantly improving and developing their talent.  Most importantly, we want employees we can make happy. Leaving Dyn doesn’t disqualify them from any of these traits. Naturally, boomerangs can check all these boxes if they were a great culture fit before, and are re-energized after working elsewhere. There needs to be a mutual appreciation for one another to make an employee-employer relationship work.

We’ve had a lot success with boomerang employees. Next time a new role opens up, don’t hold a grudge or take anything personal. Shoot an email to your old friend. If they worked well for you before, they’ll likely work even better for you now. Ultimately, losing and regaining that same valuable talent can help both the company and its employees appreciate one another.

For more stories on my adventures in internet technology, building a company, and educating the world about the importance of STEM, feel free to follow me on Twitter.