I am an HR Director in healthcare and have been with my current organization for about a year. We have over 220 locations and have over 1300 employees across the country. I have been reworking all of the processes in Human Resources that were in place prior to my leadership and am continuing to do so. One of the large process improvements I am working on is our new hire onboarding. That it is a huge project, as there are so many different facets to it. One of the processes under onboarding is rehire process. Prior to a few weeks ago the process was we would ask the old manager that the former employee worked for, if they were eligible for rehire. We were not asking them to go through any of our pre-employment processes (i.e., background or labs).

The process that was in place was broken for a variety of reasons. One of the main issues with this process was that we were allowing managers (if they were still here) have the final say whether or not we can re-hire employee. Legally that can open us to an EEOC claim. Human Resources has the employee file and when the former employee resigned or was terminated we are the ones who say if they are able to re-hired. Another problem was that there was no time limit set as to how long the former employee could be separate from us before they must go back through our pre-employment screening. We ran into a problem when we rehired a former employee (that I was never made aware of). We allowed her to start after she had been gone for over a year without drug testing her. On her first day she showed up to work under the influence of something and was sent home.

Below is the new flow chart I created for the rehire process. In our new applicant tracking system there is a spot where an applicant must select if they have ever worked here or not. I have also asked our recruiters to ask the candidate when they speak with them the same question. In addition to that I must approve all rehires and employee who have been gone longer than 6 months will have to have a background and drug test. We just started using this process 2 weeks ago and it seems to be going well. While it is an extra step for the recruiters by having to have me approve the re-hire move on to the next step in the process but in the long run it will help keep our turnover down.