After Quiet Quitting Comes Quiet Hiring! What It Is, And Why It Would Be Trending In 2023!

What Are Quiet Quitting and Quiet Hiring and Why They Matter For Corporate America

Quiet Quitting was the rage for most of 2022. As the post pandemic workforce battled stress and burnout and became lethargic, many employees resorted to what is known as Quiet Quitting, where they were unwilling to go beyond and over what was required for them in the basic expectations manner.

In other words, unlike earlier, Millennial and Gen Zers age cohorts worked according to the basic requirements and nothing more.

While this created problems for employers in terms of lost productivity and more costs to hire others to make up for the gaps in work, there was precious little they could do as the alternative was The Great Resignation, wherein large swathes of the American workforce simply quit their jobs en masse.

However, 2023 promises to be different for the employers as they can “turn the tables” and trend what is known as Quiet Hiring.

This is defined as the practice of employers encouraging internal mobility to place employees in roles that the organization needs them to be in, and otherwise not increase headcount, or hire new employees, thereby resorting to Quiet Hiring.

Is Quiet Hiring the Revenge of the Employers? Or, A Rather Mundane Cost Reduction Exercise?

So, is Quiet Hiring a way for organizations to get back at employees or extract “revenge” from them for their wayward behavior in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic?

Not really as Quiet Hiring is become the trend more from a cost benefit perspective rather than a human resources point of view. For instance, as the fears of another recession emerge, most corporates and especially the Big Tech giants are reducing headcount by laying off tens of thousands of employees.

Moreover, with enhanced cost pressures and the “hit” to the bottom-line due to inflated wage bills, more and more organizations are seeking to “maximize” existing resources, rather than hiring new talent.

Therefore, Quiet Hiring must be seen from this angle rather than as a mean way of getting back at the employees. Of course, it does help corporates that the “tables have turned” on the employees and so, they better “fall in line” and not try quirky and viral sounding, yet ultimately losing propositions like The Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting.

However, given the fact that the American labor market is still heavily “tilted” towards workers, it is anybody’s guess as to whether Quiet Hiring can be sustained throughout 2023.

Quiet Hiring is a Win-Win for All! Actualizes Synergies From Existing Resources For Value Addition

As can be seen from the discussion so far, Quiet Hiring is a win-win for employers as they leverage a Double Whammy benefit from this. On one hand, they can get capable and willing employees to do the “extra” work and also more value adding work, and on the other hand, they need now resort to new hiring that would increase their wage bill.

Of course, Quiet Hiring is not Zero Cost as the former have to be paid for the extra work they are doing by way of overtime compensation, one time bonuses, or even a raise in their salaries.

However, and there is an important distinction here, and that is, Quiet Hiring is all about leveraging internal talent rather than hire new resources, and hence, employers gain due to no costs of hiring, training, and placement.

In addition, every organization has a mix of employees who “slack” and on the other end, those who go the “extra mile”.

So, in a way Quiet Hiring balances these extremes as well as leverages the middle parts to actualize “synergies” from the existing workforce. Moreover, Quiet Hiring can also include hiring gig workers for specialized tasks thereby incurring only one-time costs.

Predictions Are Risky And Can Go Wrong, Yet Quiet Hiring Has The “Sticky” Power To Trend In 2023!

Having said that, we are just into the first month of 2023 and these are early days to predict as to what the rest of the year would be like for the American workforce.

Moreover, the post pandemic workforce has been anything but stable with each trend hitting America Inc. like an animated video game, in a roller coaster ride. So, Quiet Quitting might not last beyond the first few months of the year.

However, what it does is that it “restores” some of the power that employers lost in the last two years, though it also enhances the “value” of the workforce.

In other words, there is a symmetrical balance here with Quiet Hiring, in the sense that both employees and employers gain. The former by way of enhanced compensation or bonuses for the extra work they do, the latter by way of cost reductions.

In all this, the biggest losers are those who resorted to Quiet Quitting as they neither get promoted nor are they gaining anything beyond their bare and basic salary.

Moreover, with The Great Resignation behind us, and the “reality” of having to make ends meet hitting the workforce, Quiet Hiring can trend in 2023.

Quiet Quitting, Quiet Hiring, and the Great Resignation Are the New Normal of the Digital Age

Last, each era brings its own challenges to organizations and corporates that make up America Inc. As the pandemic “accelerated” the transition to the Digital Age, corporates find themselves to having to adjust to the new realities of the workforce landscape.

Both Quiet Quitting and Quiet Hiring are the New Normal aspects of this transition and hence, it is in the interests of America Inc. to draw up plans and evolve strategies to tackle this.

To conclude, 2023 might yet shake up the corporate world and we might seem fireworks instead of “Quiet” trends like the ones we discussed here.