Quiet Hiring: What This Means for Organizations
You’ve likely heard the term quiet quitting and understand its impact on the job market. Now, let’s talk about quiet hiring and what this means for your organization.
The job market has seen many changes in the past year, like the transformation from a candidate-driven market to seeing mass layoffs at some organizations. However, hiring hasn’t slowed down. We’re still seeing jobs added to the market and a consistently low unemployment rate.
Employers are now using quiet hiring as an alternative approach to finding the talent they need. You need to know what it is, the benefits, and the drawbacks quiet hiring can have on your organization.
What is Quiet Hiring?
Emily Rose McRae at Gartner defined quiet hiring as “when an organization acquires new skills without actually hiring new full-time employees” and there are a variety of ways to accomplish this. It ultimately boils down to whether it would be within or outside your organization.
Quiet hiring within your organization would look like asking current full-time employees to complete other projects or take on additional roles beyond the scope of their job description. This switch in job responsibilities redirects time and energy toward other essential business functions that together couldn’t create a full-time role.
Outside of your company, it would be employing contract workers to meet urgent needs. Often companies hire them since current staff wouldn’t have the specific skill set that a contractor would have to work on certain projects.
Benefits of Quiet Hiring
Quiet hiring can benefit your organization by helping you save money when obtaining talent to fill skills gaps.
Focusing on hiring externally can help your company save money by using contract workers to help address pressing tasks. This is a good option since contract workers can offer a lot of flexibility since they’re hired on for a fixed amount of time. You save money since they’re only compensated for the time they work on a project and you don’t need to pay for training, benefits, etc.
Another benefit to hiring contract workers is opening yourself to a wider talent pool with specialized skills. This helps you find the ideal skill set to complete a project quickly and effectively.
Drawbacks to Quiet Hiring
Although quiet hiring can offer cost-saving benefits, there are other factors to consider.
Reorganizing internal teams is a good short-term solution to tackle projects – especially if there are overlapping skills among your current employees. However, suppose you focus on restructuring responsibilities for employees internally. In that case, employees might become easily burnt out by the additional workload or from the switch in job responsibilities.
This can lead to lower retention rates within your organization and leave you with additional open roles you need to hire for, which can take away time from your job.
Internal hiring can be incredibly helpful in the short term. However, if your company is in need of long-term help, it’s more sensible to hire a full-time employee dedicated to your organization.
Quiet hiring is an excellent solution to help your company cut costs without laying off staff. Although it’s a beneficial short-term solution to addressing skills gaps, it shouldn’t be the long-term answer to filling vacancies in your company This is because, at some point, you may need to hire talent to take on these roles permanently.
Whether you’re looking to quiet hire for contract roles or need candidates for full-time positions, Addison Group is the solution to finding talent. With more than 20 years of experience, we have the expertise to find candidates with the skills to add value to your organization. Reach out now!
