As the AI talent wars have intensified between OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, among others, a strategy that Google has been competing with is by making aggressive rehiring actions of former employees.
CNBC has noted that some 20 percent of the Software AI Engineers Google hired in 2025 to work on artificial intelligence were what Google refers to as boomerang employees, which is more than in previous years.
A Google spokesperson confirmed that the statistic was still accurate in December and that the company experienced an increase in the number of AI researchers joining major competitors by 2024.
In a statement, the spokesperson said that “We’re energized by our momentum, compute and talent — engineers want to work here to keep building groundbreaking products.”
The head of compensation at Google, John Casey, has just informed employees during a meeting regarding the rehiring. According to audio that was reviewed by CNBC, Casey stated that AI-focused software engineers are lured by Google due to its deep pockets and extensive computational infrastructure required to do high-end AI tasks.
Google has a significant pool of former employees to tap into, especially after the most massive layoff in company’s history in early 2023, when parent company Alphabet laid off 12,000 employees, making it 6 percent smaller.
That came after a decline in the market lured by the skyrocketing inflation and escalating interest rates. Since that time, Google has remained in a state of rolling layoffs and buyouts.
In the industry, the number of employee boomerangs continues to rise, data released earlier this year by ADP Research reveals, with the sector that it defines as information demonstrating the most striking statistics.
A slow pace of launching generative AI has seen Google scramble to keep pace with the swift progress of OpenAI, which released ChatGPT in late 2022.
The company is no longer struggling with missteps in launching a variety of products, and it has recovered its footing this year as its heavy investment in AI infrastructure and a successful app, Gemini 3, was announced last month.
However, the Alphabet’s stock price is up over 60 percent this year, performing better than all of its megacap counterparts. Google has historically been a hotbed of engineering and innovation, and competitors have long looked to Google in an attempt to steal talent.
CNBC reported in July that earlier this year, Microsoft recruited approximately two dozen workers previously collaborating at Google to its DeepMind AI research team. Meanwhile, OpenAI has swung its wallet open, and so has Meta.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman informed employees in June that Meta had been providing $100 million signing bonuses and was actively seeking to retain employees. Noam Shazeer asserted that last year, Google brought back a major figure in AI.
Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas left Google in 2021 to found AI platform Character.AI, allegedly due to Google rejecting their bids to attempt to get the firm to move its internal chatbot forward.
Therefore, Shazeer and De Freitas were among several other Character.AI research team members who returned to DeepMind in August 2024 as part of a licensing agreement for the startup technology.
In the last year, Google has been making more risky decisions, launching products faster, although they may not be regarded as fully ready. CNBC reported in August that Google has also strived to eliminate bureaucracy across the entire company, including mass employee buyouts and dropping over one-third of its managers who manage small groups of workers.
People familiar with the matter stated that Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who retired and came out of it in 2023, has occasionally approached potential candidates personally to hire them. Thus, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly reached out to researchers on behalf of his company.
