What is quiet hiring and how did it become so popular?

Recently, two phenomena have emerged in the labor market relating to the attitudes of contemporary employees and managers – quiet quitting and quiet firing. Apart from these two controversial behaviors, we can now also distinguish quiet hiring, understood as a recruitment strategy adopted by companies (it is very popular among Google employees). HR specialists predict that this trend will dominate the labor market in 2023. What is quiet hiring and why is it gaining popularity?

Quiet hiring – table of contents:

1. What is quiet hiring?
2. How does quiet hiring work?
3. Why did quiet hiring become so popular?
4. Summary

What is quiet hiring?

Quiet hiring is a practice implemented by the HR department to acquire needed skills without hiring new full-time employees. Quiet hiring is aimed at solving an urgent recruitment need by temporarily assigning employees to perform duties supporting the most critical areas of the organization. Quiet hiring can be done internally and externally.

External quiet hiring usually refers to temporarily filling staff shortages with subcontractors from outside the organization. Such a person is not hired full-time, but only to help, for example, with a project that is just starting. Once it is completed, the company resigns from their support – unless new needs arise. Internal quiet hiring, on the other hand, refers to the temporary use of resources present in the organization for new positions or activities.

How does quiet hiring work?

Quiet hiring is supposed to benefit both sides of the HR process. It allows the employer to achieve the expected results with the resources at hand, while for the employee it may mean a certain career change. The condition for a positive response to such a situation, however, is to properly diagnose the needs of employees and offer new positions to those who consider leaving the organization.

Why did quiet hiring become so popular?

The phenomenon of quiet hiring has emerged because of the apparent talent shortage in the market. It will undoubtedly be most popular among companies that cannot afford (due to internal factors or the consequences of the current economic situation) to hire new full-time employees. With some companies having to slow down hiring, the opportunity to temporarily move existing resources to areas of need will be positively received.

Some HR professionals even believe that quiet hiring will solve the problem of quiet quitting, as it provides new opportunities for advancement in the current workplace, prompting employees to acquire or strengthen skills they didn’t have.

However, quiet hiring is not viewed positively by everyone. You might hear voices suggesting that it is merely a way to add responsibilities without increasing salaries, or in the case of some companies, to use employees to save a sinking ship. A proper understanding of how quiet hiring works is therefore essential before implementing the process in an organization.

Summary

It might seem that quiet hiring is the ideal solution to maintain expected productivity and workflows without having to hire new employees (which is always a burden on the budget). However, in order for the described action to bring the expected results, it is necessary to properly communicate this change to employees. This is because they may come to believe that a temporary change in their duties means there is no demand for the skills they already have and will prompt them to look for a new job. It is therefore important to clarify what is behind the decision to implement quiet hiring in an organization.

Read also: Quiet quitting – do we have to work hard to be happy?

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