Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer may be a little like Michael Jordan on the 1980s Chicago Bulls basketball team. Before they became a championship force in the 90s, Jordan was a star but without the supporting players who would eventually help him win NBA trophies.

Mayer has been trying to build her own winning team, poaching a number of colleagues from Google and pruning some existing Yahoo executives in an effort to put her stamp on the company and change its culture. Now, reports TechCrunch, the company is trying to lure back some former Yahoo engineers and executives.

Picking up on a tweet from former Yahoo Tom Coates, TC says that recruiters are sending out “welcome back” packets that discuss how things have changed at the company and how the future is bright. Presumably there are also offers and incentives in these packages.

The TC article details the challenges that Yahoo is having recruiting because of the company’s generally poor reputation these days. Mayer is trying hard to change that.

Though Mayer is charismatic and persuasive there’s a Catch-22: until Yahoo can show some new products and momentum it will have difficulty gaining the confidence of would-be employees. Without some talented hires the company will have trouble making much of that progress.

Yahoo will announce Q4 earnings, the second under Mayer, on January 28. In the just over six months since Yahoo hired Mayer as CEO the company has seen its stock recover from a low of roughly $14 to $20 per share.

Yahoo’s overall strategy remains a bit cloudy, a laundry list of aspirations with numerous echoes of the past. The newest twist on that strategy suggests that the site wants to become an aggregator of content regardless of its source — the “Google of content,” according to AllThingsD.

A well executed version of that concept however could succeed in growing Yahoo’s audience and revenues and reinvigorating its brand. The company recently relaunched its second most important product, Yahoo Mail, to positive reviews and higher audience engagement.

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Top News | Yahoo: Business Issues

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling

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