How to Turn a Leaver into a Keeper

Towards the end of COVID I had one conversation that has stayed with me ever since. A candidate who had been made redundant from one of the Big 4 firms. She was experienced, well-regarded, and had every reason to be bitter about what had happened to her. She was not bitter at all. Instead of rushing back to the market, she had taken 12 months off to do something completely different. She had become a cleaner.

In that single conversation she talked about her old firm with genuine warmth. The work, the team, the culture of the particular division she had been part of. She had been made redundant as part of a restructuring, not for performance. She understood that. And she told me she wanted to go back.

Being the curious recruiter I am, I looked her up on LinkedIn after we spoke. She was an A-grade candidate. She could have walked into almost any finance role in Melbourne at a moment of strong demand. Partners at other Big 4 firms would have taken her call. Mid-market practices would have offered her senior positions. This person had real options, and she chose to return to the firm that let her go.

What earned it

The easy read of that story is that she was loyal. But loyalty is the effect, not the cause. The more important question is what the firm had done over time to earn that response. From everything she described, the answer was not complicated. The team had invested in her development. Leadership had been visible and honest. She had felt genuinely part of something, not just a headcount filling a function. When the redundancy came, it was handled with care. She was spoken to like an adult. That is what she was choosing to return to. Not a salary band. Not a prestigious brand name. A specific experience of being valued that had accumulated over years.

In HR and recruitment circles this person has a name: the boomerang employee. Someone who leaves an organisation, for whatever reason, and later returns. The research on boomerang employees is generally positive. They typically onboard faster, require less initial training, and carry institutional knowledge that cannot be replicated by an external hire. More importantly, they arrive with their eyes open. They know the culture, the pressures, and the people. The fact that they chose to come back, when they had alternatives, is itself a form of due diligence that most hiring processes cannot replicate.

Start Talking About Growth

Most conversations about retention in finance focus on remuneration: salary benchmarking, bonuses, flexible benefits packages. These things matter, and getting them wrong will cost you people. But they are hygiene factors. They prevent departure. They do not create the kind of commitment that leads a talented professional to choose your firm over every available alternative when they have complete freedom to go anywhere. The retention levers that build that level of loyalty are harder to measure and slower to compound: consistent investment in development, leaders who give honest feedback rather than vague praise, a culture where high performers feel seen, and an exit process, if it ever comes, that is handled with dignity. Finance leaders who get this right tend to treat recruitment and retention as strategic functions rather than administrative ones, and hold managers accountable not just for technical output but for how their teams develop over time.

The bottom line

Finance is a relatively small world. The CA who worked in your team five years ago could now be the finance manager at a company you would like as a client. The analyst you developed into a business partner has a network of peers who are all asking each other where they should consider moving next. The way you treat people on the way in and on the way out echoes for a long time. Cultural investment is not a soft HR initiative. It is one of the highest-return activities available to a finance leader building a capable, committed team.

The cleaner who turned down the market to go back to the firm that let her go is the most vivid example I have encountered. What version of that story is your team creating?