Are you sure you should be cutting those roles?

Rebounding or boomerang employees are nothing new, but AI is changing the terms of demands. 

Nearly one in four (24 per cent) of younger workers have been rebounded due to AI, while 36 per cent say it has happened to someone close to them, according to SHL’s Talent Mobility at Work 2026 report.  

The report defines AI rebounding as when employees replaced by AI go back to the same job. The report surveyed more than 2,000 employees across the U.S. and the U.K., with U.S. respondents reporting more experience with AI rebounding. 

For many, the willingness to go back comes after specific conditions are met: —   

• 51 per cent of workers report wanting a substantial pay increase,  

• 42 per cent report wanting specific guarantees about their job security 

•  40 per cent report wanting clarity on how AI would affect their role in the future. 

 Eight per cent overall say they would refuse to come under any circumstances. 

Nita Chhinzer, associate professor of leadership and organizational management at the University of Guelph, says this rebound problem starts before the layoffs and cuts, with workforce preparation. 

“This is probably one of the first times that we’ve actually had proactive cuts where the financial savings hadn’t happened yet,” she says. “Companies were preemptively making cuts with the intention that in the future we will achieve these desired savings.” 

Giving into the AI hype 

Part of the reason why this phenomenon is occurring now more than ever is because of how companies were sold on what AI could do, she says. 

“It’s this idea that tech giants make very optimistic predictions about how soon technology will be adopted and the scale of that adoption,” Chhinzer says. “And some of the predictions they’ve made have been wrong.” 

Big predictions, she says, were made by companies such as Meta — and, on top of that, vendors selling AI tools promised 20- to 30- per- cent increases in production . 

Earlier this year, Meta laid off 10 per cent of its workforce in May 2026, with internal plans having explored far deeper cuts driven by a vision of AI taking over much of employees’ daily work — however, that ultimately did not go forward, according to Reuters.  

None of these promises or predictions, considered that AI tools still needed the manpower and quality checks to keep projects moving, she says. It also wasn’t until later on that, companies  started noticing these AI tools were also expensive. 

How HR is playing into these cuts 

So, how do employers figure out when jobs can be cut due to AI — and not just succumb to the hype? Chhinzer says that starts with re-looking at the job descriptions. 

“ One of the big things is that we have not been doing a good job in the HR community keeping our job descriptions up to date,” she says. 

Even now job descriptions can still be very archaic, Chhinzer says — only capturing the tasks that are required. That becomes a problem when 50 per cent of job performance, is contextual, she says. 

“It’s not looking at problem identification, being part of a team, communicating, taking initiative — those things that are the glue that keep the company together.” 

That can make jobs easier to cut without understanding the bigger role those positions can play for the organization, Chhinzer says. 

Performance management is not really performing 

Performance management also plays a part, she says. A lot of the time, these cuts are being made without understanding who the critical key performers are on the team. 

“Research from performance management tells us that employers consistently inflate performance evaluations to either impression manage that they’re doing a great job with their team, or to protect their team members from getting a bad performance review,” Chhinzer says. 

Part of that, she says, is due to managers not having the best information and judgment about a person. 

“They don’t want to ruin the social investment they’ve made in the person,” she says. “When all information is truncated to show that we’ve got strong performers, we have a hard time not identifying the poor performers who we’ll be cutting — but actually identifying the people we should be retaining.” 

Research from a 2026 BetterWorks study shows many HR leaders say performance management can play an important role in determining organizational outcomes, however, many cannot back up that claim with a metric. 

Brianna Foulds, people business partner and associate vice- president at Cornerstone OnDemand, a workforce readiness organization that provides learning management, talent management and workforce AI tools, sees a similar pattern. In a statement to Canadian HR Reporter, she says customers also feel the pressure to move fast with AI demands without understanding the talent they have. 

“Most leaders can tell you their headcount and job titles but can’t say what skills their people actually have, where those skills sit, or how they fit the work coming next,” she says. 

Internal mobility before the cut 

Instead of moving right to layoffs or cuts, Chhinzer recommends that organizations think about internal mobility opportunities first. 

“I think [with] retention, — there has generally been a preference for mobility of people from groups that are in decline to groups that are in growth,” she says. 

This allows employers to offer employees the chance to learn new skills, explore a new area, or take on a new commitment. 

The SHL report finds that there is a gap between those opportunities — with 54 per cent of respondents reporting that their employer favours hiring externally rather than promoting talent internally. Forty-seven per cent of employees say they would be open to retraining for another job to avoid losing their position to AI. 

Chhinzer notes the numbers from the report can be inflated. “The conversations anecdotally I’m having with executives and the statistics show internal hiring is more preferential than external hiring, especially the higher up you go in the organization,” she says. 

Reskilling a strategy not an afterthought 

Reskilling, Foulds adds, is often seen as an afterthought once cuts happen. She recommends companies always have a constant strategy that helps prepare organizations for what can come next. 

Before any cuts or restructuring, skills should be embedded in the workforce plan to build awareness of who already possesses them or has enough to be reskilled for another role, Foulds says. 

“Llikely the talent you need is already in the building. They just need to be moved to a new seat, and AI allows you to see that at scale,”  

Bringing back the boomeranger employee 

For organizations hiring those boomerang employees back, there are challenges.. 

“If you bring them back at higher levels, you have an internal equity consideration now because your existing employees were paid at lower levels,” she says. 

Managing the rebounding employees’ perception of the company is also a problem — along with that of employees who might have survived the layoff or cut, Chhinzer says. 

In these situations, she recommends organizations offer rebounding employees alternative work arrangements — such as contractors, consultants, or part-time workers — rather than full-time permanent employees. 

“You can manipulate — or work the system a little bit,” she says.  

“These few people that we’ve sent out that we cannot offer job security to, they came back as contractors on a fixed-term contract. For that fixed term, they will be getting paid a little bit more than our existing employees — but our existing employees have that job security, the benefits, the healthcare, the retirement, the training and development.”