“Quiet Hiring”: A latest workplace trend

“Quiet Hiring”: A latest workplace trend

A new workplace buzzword is going around after “moonlighting” and “quiet quitting” and that is named as “Quiet Hiring”. This new word in itself is deceptive as it is neither quite as the buzz is surrounded in the social media platforms nor does it involve actual hiring.

“Quiet Hiring” refers to the way the organisation can hire new talent without getting into the process of new hiring.

What is “Quiet Hiring”?

It is the solution to the widespread talent gap due to the latest trend of layoffs. The companies shift the employees from one department to another instead of hiring new employees.
This term is declared as one of the workplace trends among the nine trends of the year by Gartner, a technological research and consulting firm.

What was the Catalyst?

Quiet hiring is a response to the quiet quitting trend of late 2022. According to Gartner, when employees “quiet quit” though organisations retain people but they lose skills so in order to turn this practice HR leaders in 2023 introduced “Quiet Hiring” which involves a way to acquire new skills and capabilities without adding new full time employees. It is the way to keep required skills in the organisation without hampering the business in a cost effective way.

When any organisation acquires new skills without actually hiring new full-time employees it can either be taken as hiring short-term contractors or it might encourage current employees to temporarily adapt to new responsibility within the organisation.

Benefit of Quiet Hiring

Employees may gain a lot from the current trend amid competitive hiring, economic slowdown and cost-cutting within the organisation.
As per Gartner it allows organisations to strategically “address acute, immediate business needs by assigning existing employees to new roles, expanding existing employees’ responsibilities through stretch and upskilling opportunities (in both cases with commensurate compensation), by hiring temporary workers to perform specific tasks, or any combination of three”.

It offers employees an opportunity to gain new skills and gain more experience, enhance current skills, and utilise their potential in resume strengthening and make themselves marketable.

Though there are certain drawbacks as some claim that this trend will take advantage of the loyal employees. But according to Gartner this is a win-win situation for both employers and employees.
Some say that this will create unnecessary pressure on employees for the work which was not a part of their job description. Quiet hiring will make the employers take advantage of their internal talent without adding to cost and headcount.

One user also said that it will burden employees with additional work without paying them more and “quiet hiring” is also getting termed as “ quiet slavery”.

We need to wait and watch the shelf-life of the term and its implementation and its effect on employee efficiency and satisfaction.

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