The war for artificial intelligence (AI) talent among companies such as OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic is heating up, and part of Google's competitive strategy is to aggressively rehire departed employees. According to sources, about 20% of the AI software engineers Google will recruit in 2025 are so-called "boomerang employees" (that is, returning to the original company after leaving the company), which is a significant increase from previous years.
A Google spokesperson confirmed that the data was accurate as of December this year and said the company had an increase in the number of AI researchers from its main competitors compared with 2024.
"We are excited about our growth momentum, computing resources and talent pool - engineers want to work here and continue to build breakthrough products," the spokesperson said in a statement.
Former Google employees are rich in resources
Google compensation chief John Casey recently discussed rehiring former employees at an employee meeting. Casey pointed out that software engineers focused on AI are attracted by Google's deep financial strength and the large-scale computing infrastructure required to conduct high-end AI research, and these resources are the key elements needed to conduct cutting-edge AI research.
Google has a large pool of former employees, especially after experiencing its largest layoffs in history in early 2023, when the company eliminated 12,000 jobs and reduced its total workforce by about 6%. The layoffs come after a market downturn caused by high inflation and rising interest rates. Since then, Google has continued to promote batch layoffs and employee buyout plans.
Data released by ADP Research earlier this year showed that the number of "returning employees" is rising across the industry, with areas it classifies as the "information industry" performing particularly well.
As a historical powerhouse of engineering and innovation, Google has long been the target of rival attempts to "poach" employees, a situation that continues to this day.
Earlier this year, Microsoft reportedly recruited about two dozen employees from Google's DeepMind AI research lab.
At the same time, OpenAI and Meta are also investing heavily in talent competition.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees in June that Meta had offered signing bonuses of up to $100 million and that he was taking active measures to retain employees.
At the end of last year, Google welcomed back an important figure in the field of AI-Noam Shazeer.
Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas left Google in 2021 and founded the AI platform Character.AI. One of the reasons for their departures was reportedly Google's refusal to move forward with internal chatbot projects.
In August 2024, Shazeer and De Freitas, along with other members of the Character.AI research team, returned to DeepMind under a deal involving the startup's technology licensing.
Over the past year, Google has adopted a more aggressive strategy, accelerating the pace of product launches even if the products are not generally considered fully mature. At the same time, Google is also promoting "debureaucracy" across the company, implementing large-scale employee buyouts, and eliminating more than one-third of the management positions responsible for small teams.
According to people familiar with the matter, Google co-founder Sergey Brin will sometimes personally contact potential candidates for recruitment after his return in 2023.
Google strategy succeeds
Judging from the results, Google's strategy has been successful. After OpenAI ChatGPT in October 2022, Google once fell behind in large AI models, and the company had previously been regarded as a leader in the AI field.
After experiencing setbacks in many product launches, Google has rebounded this year and released its latest model Gemini 3 last month. The large model received widespread acclaim and caused OpenAI to issue an internal red alert.
Since the beginning of this year, Google’s stock price has risen by more than 60%, the most outstanding performance among all large technology stocks.