‘Quiet Hiring’ Is Latest Workplace Trend That Companies Are Using To Cut Costs

From the Great Resignation to quiet quitting, the morphing corporate landscape has seen its share of new buzzwords of late. But hark, new challenges await. With the threat of a recession looming, companies haven’t just dismissed employees in droves but also resorted to something called ‘quiet hiring’.

Quiet hiring is a twist on ‘quiet quitting’—another buzzword coined by TikTokers to express the behavior of detaching from their jobs and performing the bare minimum, oftentimes done to prioritize their personal well-being. The newer “trend,” however, turns the focus to the employer.

Quiet hiring is when a company upskills and fills gaps in a workplace without actually recruiting real people.

The concept, or at least its term, was relatively unfamiliar up until a couple of weeks ago. It was popularized by Emily Rose McRae, senior director of research at consulting firm Gartner, whose 2023 trends report for the future of work was eventually featured on CNBC, officially propelling the phrase into the corporate lexicon. Before that, it seems Inc. introduced the term to outline Google’s push to expand or rework the roles of overachievers, Vox reports.

As per the CNBC report, quiet hiring can take place internally and externally. Internal quiet hiring is when the business temporarily or permanently moves an existing worker to a different role or expands the capacity of their position. External quiet hiring, on the other hand, occurs when a company outsources short-term contractors without onboarding new permanent employees.

Gartner foresees that quiet hiring will be a popular strategy among employers because it’s a softer alternative to letting talent go. It’s also a cost-effective way to boost a company’s portfolio and enables bosses to quickly tackle high-priority activities.

Employees can see this as a challenge or opportunity to negotiate a better package. Either way, there’s no discounting the initial—or even prolonged—bouts of hiccups they may face, especially if the job scope in their new in-house career switch doesn’t appeal to them.

Research conducted by career board Monster Jobs suggests that 80% of workers have been quiet-hired. The finding is close to that of a survey run by employee transparency site JobSage, which notes that 78% of workers in the US have been surreptitiously “promoted,” with 57% claiming that they’ve felt manipulated or exploited by the move.

Accordingly, the art and design, hospitality, food services, government, and education sectors are the most likely to quiet-hire.

All told, this trend doesn’t seem like such a novel concept, but it allows those involved to make sense of the evolving climate. By labeling things, people can better understand a confusing situation they are in and ultimately “make the illegible legible,” Anne Helen Petersen, co-author of Out of Office, tells Vox.

To be frank, we were initially skeptical at first sight of the so-called buzzword, but the notion quickly took on a life of its own. McRae also insists that there are differences between quiet hiring and outsourcing, or stretching a worker too thin.

Whereas upskilling has been more of a benefit for ambitious employees, with quiet hiring, it’s management’s turn to fill expertise gaps, according to McRae. Plus, employees are being paid for stepping out of their traditional roles.

McRae says she’s thankful the term has caused a bit of a recoil, because it means that people are taking things seriously and not just buying into something described as a trend.

It’s natural for subordinates to feel hesitant about taking on a position that’s vastly different from the one they were hired for, and they could even feel like their existing role is redundant in the company, nudging them to search for greener pastures elsewhere. The responsibility thus lies on employers to communicate the reasons for the expansion as well as reiterate a staffer’s strengths.

Those who have been silently promoted could see this uncomfortable shift as a stepping stone to advance their careers, suggests McRae. If they’ve done a good job in this role, they can even use it to negotiate a real promotion.

[via Vox, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, cover illustration 224294906 © Little_prince | Dreamstime.com]