Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, United States, Wednesday, June 4, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
With the war for AI talent heating up between companies like OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic, one-way Google has been competitive is to aggressively rehire former employees.
About 20% of software engineers working on artificial intelligence hired by Google in 2025 were so-called boomerang employees, an increase from previous years, CNBC has learned. A Google spokesperson confirmed the statistics remained accurate in December and said the company had seen an increase in AI researchers from major competitors compared to 2024.
“We are energized by our momentum, our computing capacity and our talent. Engineers want to work here to continue creating revolutionary products,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
John Casey, head of compensation at Google, recently informed employees at a meeting about the rehire. Casey said AI-focused software engineers are attracted to Google’s deep pockets and heavy IT infrastructure needed to do advanced AI work, according to audio reviewed by CNBC.
Google has a large pool of former employees to tap, especially after its largest wave of layoffs on record in early 2023, when parent company Alphabet cut 12,000 jobs, reducing the workforce by 6%. This follows a market slowdown caused by soaring inflation and rising interest rates. Since then, Google has continued to make layoffs and buyouts.
Across the industry, employee boomerangs are on the rise, according to data released earlier this year by ADP Research, with the sector it ranks as showing the darkest numbers.
Google has been scrambling to catch up in generative AI after a slow start following OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in late 2022. After fumbling through a number of product rollouts, the company has rebounded this year, thanks to significant investments in AI infrastructure and the success of its Gemini app. Google announced its latest model, Gemini 3, last month.
Alphabet’s stock price is up more than 60% this year, outperforming all of its mega-cap peers.
As a historic hotbed of engineering and innovation, Google has long been a place where competitors turn in an attempt to poach talent. This is still the case.
Earlier this year, Microsoft hired about two dozen employees from Google’s DeepMind AI research lab, CNBC reported in July. OpenAI, meanwhile, has opened its wallets widely, alongside Meta. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees in June that Meta was offering $100 million signing bonuses and was aggressively trying to retain employees.
At the end of last year, Google brought back a major figure in AI: Noam Shazeer.
Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas left Google in 2021 to launch AI platform Character.AI, reportedly leaving Google after Google rebuffed their attempts to get the company to advance its in-house chatbot.
Along with other members of the Character.AI research team, Shazeer and De Freitas joined DeepMind in August 2024 as part of a licensing agreement for the startup’s technology.
Over the past year, Google has taken more risks by shipping its products faster, even though they aren’t considered completely ready. Google has also made company-wide efforts to cut out bureaucracy, carrying out massive employee buyouts and eliminating more than a third of its managers overseeing small teams, CNBC reported in August.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who retired in 2023, sometimes personally contacted potential candidates to recruit them, according to people familiar with the matter who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the media. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also reportedly contacted researchers on behalf of his company.
WATCH: OpenAI’s Sam Altman says Google remains a huge threat
