What To Know About Quiet Hiring

Quiet hiring, a growing trend in response to quiet quitting and the uncertain job market, involves employers reallocating or upskilling current employees to fill skill gaps without formal new hires, offering a strategic but sometimes controversial alternative to traditional recruitment.

What To Know About Quiet Hiring

Nov 26, 2024

Blog, Recruiting Best Practices

Allie Blackham

You may have heard of “quiet quitting.” This phrase has taken off online in the past couple of years and its exact meaning can vary depending on context. It basically denotes an employee doing the bare minimum of their work description. This term was popular in discussions of the so-called “Great Resignation,” when 50.5 million Americans quit their jobs in 2022, besting the previous year’s record. “Quiet hiring” is another phrase that’s gaining popularity. It’s essentially the other side of the coin of quiet quitting. It can work differently in various situations, though. This article will explain what quiet hiring is and how it works.

What Is Quiet Hiring?

Quiet hiring is, in a way, the employer’s response to quiet quitting. (However, the actual opposite may be “quiet firing” — the morally suspect process of gradually making a work environment so undesirable for an employee that they quit.) Quiet hiring isn’t as unethical as quiet firing, but it’s an idea that certainly has its critics.

Quiet hiring has become prevalent in today’s uncertain job market. Emily Rose McRae of Gartner popularized the term to describe how an organization can gain new skills without acquiring new staff.

Quiet hiring, or silent hiring, effectively constitutes delegating responsibilities to current employees rather than hiring new ones. It asks employees to do additional or different work that’s not in their original job description. The logic for management is, “Why hire someone new to do a job that a current staff member is qualified to perform?”

The argument makes sense and, in some cases, quiet hiring is a perfectly reasonable tactic that suits all parties involved. Quiet hiring isn’t always the best move, though, and it can upset employees.

How Does Quiet Hiring Work?

If a company needs a certain set of tasks done, it can hire a new employee. But this takes time and money. Finding the right candidate can be time consuming, not to mention that the business would have to pay that new employee.

Many organizations have found they already employ staff who have the skills they seek. Rather than hire somebody new, an organization can simply direct one of their current employees to use their skills in a new role. This may come with a formal offer of a different position, or it could be more subtle and informal, and it may or may not involve more compensation.

Sometimes people use “quiet hiring” to refer to bringing in short-term contractors, but this usage is rarer. In most cases, when someone uses this term, they mean redirecting or redeploying already employed staff to new roles and new tasks that they never intended to perform.

What Are Some Examples of Quiet Hiring?

Quiet hiring can occur in many different sectors; there isn’t one industry in which the practice appears to be most prevalent. It happens a lot in office jobs and in other work where staff members have many transferable skills. It’s less common in certain trades that involve many regulations and accreditations. For example, a developer can’t instruct a fully qualified plumber to start operating the forklift if they don’t have a forklift certification.

For roles that don’t involve required certifications or accreditations, though, it can happen a lot, and often in ways that you may not even recognize as quiet hiring. For example, a marketing agency may transfer one of its content writers into a role that’s more focused on search engine optimization. Both tasks fall under the purview of marketing, and there’s considerable overlap. However, there’s no question that they’re different roles, and this could cause friction if the content writer isn’t fully onboard with the change.

Another example: A sales department may gradually shift a current employee who’s knowledgeable about their sales software into more of an IT role. That employee might help organize the platform for efficiency or train other salespeople to use the software. In this example, the original role — sales — differs significantly from the new role — software expert. When the difference between the two roles is this significant, the chances of employee frustration or dissatisfaction may be higher.

Last, let’s look at a situation where an organization is trying to open up a new market in a foreign country. If that country speaks a different language than most of the employees of the company, this can be a problem. However, if one staff member is fluent in the language of this foreign country, management may delegate translation tasks to that employee. That person now finds themselves in the role of translator, even if this prospect wasn’t a conceivable outcome when they began working for the business.

Each of these scenarios could work out well or poorly. It depends on the nature and volume of the new tasks, the disposition of the employee and whether any bonuses, perks or pay raises are involved. For management, it’s important to know the potential advantages and disadvantages of quiet hiring before using it as a method of filling internal roles.

What Are the Benefits of Quiet Hiring for Employers?

For management, there are several potential positives to quiet hiring. These include:

Save on payroll: This is perhaps the clearest and biggest advantage: it’s cheaper. Why hire someone new when you can have somebody you’re already paying do the new job? Even if a company’s quiet hiring strategy involves additional compensation, it’s unlikely to equal the salary of a brand-new employee or even a temporary worker.
Save on hiring and recruiting costs: Creating job listings, deciding where to post them and/or working with recruiting agencies all require time and resources. Hiring is often an expensive process. Quiet hiring allows companies to save on these costs and labor.
More efficient than hiring a new employee: Training a new employee and getting them accustomed to their new work environment also costs money. New hires often take a while to ramp up to be as productive as current employees, so quiet hiring practices can be more efficient.
Can bridge a skills gap with existing employee talent: Companies usually have to make new hires to bridge skills gaps. Quiet hiring taps the reserve of skills a company already employs.
Can help with employee development: Staff often want to learn new skills. This can help them with their career advancement and make them more well-rounded individuals.
Promotes internal mobility : Staff also want to feel like there’s room for progress within an organization. While quiet hiring isn’t exactly a promotion, it can demonstrate that employees aren’t trapped in their current roles forever.
May be the best solution for fulfilling niche roles : For rare skills or unorthodox tasks, it can be exceedingly difficult to find the right candidate. Quiet hiring can be a lot easier in these cases.

What Are the Drawbacks of Quiet Hiring for Employers?

Some potential disadvantages of quiet hiring include:

May contribute to employee burnout: Employers can’t just heap more and more responsibilities on their staff. This inevitably leads to worker burnout and low job satisfaction.
Could harm employee engagement and inadvertently encourage quiet quitting: Quiet hiring efforts can cause resentment among staff and backfire on companies by lowering employee morale.
Existing employees may not have the specialized skills or talent an organization needs for the new role: There might be a temptation to shoehorn a current employee into a position they’re not fully qualified for. This can stress out the employee and lead to poorly completed tasks.
May hurt worker satisfaction and increase employee turnover: Staff members don’t always appreciate quiet hiring practices and this might hurt employee retention. Worker turnover is still a big issue, with 68.1 million total job separations in the U.S. in 2023.
Some organizations may rely on quiet hiring simply because they have an inefficient application process : Quiet hiring might be the best option for your company, but are you sure? Sometimes organizations fall back on these strategies simply because their hiring process is deeply flawed.

What Is the Effect on Employees?

When framed the right way, quiet hiring can work great. It can encourage employee development, career advancement and the acquisition of new skills. Employees must feel that management isn’t trying to trick them into doing more work, though. If, during the hiring process, HR professionals tell new candidates that roles at their organization are more fluid, then employees may be more willing to take on different responsibilities as needed.

Whether hiring new full-time employees, gig workers or asking existing employees to take on different roles, the hiring process is key. ApplicantStack can help HR teams and recruiters determine a candidate’s aptitude and willingness to take on responsibilities outside the scope of the position for which they’re applying. Start a free trial and see how it works!

Allie Blackham

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