Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai during the Bloomberg Tech Conference on Wednesday, June 4, 2025 in San Francisco, California, USA.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
As the competition for AI talent intensifies among companies like OpenAI, Meta And human, one-way traffic google has competed by aggressively rehiring former employees.
According to a CNBC survey, about 20% of the software engineers working on artificial intelligence hired by Google in 2025 will be so-called boomerang employees, an increase from the previous year. A Google spokesperson confirmed that this statistic is still accurate as of December, with the company saying it has seen a sharp increase in the number of AI researchers coming from its major competitors compared to 2024.
“We are powered by our momentum, computing power and people. Our engineers want to work here and continue to develop breakthrough products,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
Google’s head of compensation, John Casey, recently spoke to employees at a conference about rehiring. Software engineers specializing in AI are attracted to Google’s deep pockets and vast computational infrastructure needed to perform advanced AI work, Casey said, according to audio seen by CNBC.
Google has a large pool of former employees to unearth, especially after its largest-ever layoffs in early 2023, when parent company Alphabet cut its workforce by 12,000 people and 6%. After that, the market continued to slump due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates. Google has continued to make gradual layoffs and acquisitions since then.
Data released earlier this year by ADP Research shows that employee boomerang is on the rise across industries, with the most notable numbers in the sectors the company classifies as information.
Google has been racing to make a comeback in the generative AI space after a slow start after OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022. After fumbles with a number of product rollouts, the company bounced back this year with major investments in AI infrastructure and the success of its Gemini app. Google announced its latest model, Gemini 3, last month.
Alphabet’s stock price has risen more than 60% this year, outpacing all of its giant-cap peers.
As a historic hotbed of engineering and innovation, Google has long been a place competitors have looked to poach talent. That’s still the case today.
Earlier this year, Microsoft hired about 20 employees from Google’s DeepMind AI lab, CNBC reported in July. On the other hand, OpenAI, like Meta, is expanding the wallet significantly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees in June that Meta was offering a $100 million signing bonus and was actively working to retain staff.
Late last year, Google brought back AI mainstay Noam Shazeer.
Shazier and Daniel de Freitas left Google in 2021 to launch the AI platform Character.AI, but they reportedly left after Google rejected their efforts to promote an internal chatbot.
Shazeer and De Freitas, along with other members of the Character.AI research team, returned to DeepMind in August 2024 under a licensing agreement for the startup’s technology.
Over the past year, Google has been taking more risks and shipping products faster, even when they aren’t considered fully ready. Google is also making a company-wide effort to eliminate bureaucracy, including conducting widespread employee buyouts and eliminating more than a third of managers overseeing small teams, CNBC reported in August.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who came out of retirement in 2023, sometimes reached out personally to recruit candidates, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also reportedly contacted the researchers on behalf of the company.
WATCH: OpenAI’s Sam Altman says Google remains a big threat
