Remember “silent care”? Silent hire is the new trend in the workplace in 2023

The term “quiet exit” went viral last year, describing people who stay at their jobs but mentally take a step back — like working the bare minimum and not making their work the center of their lives.

Now, in 2023, a new workplace trend called “silent hiring” is on the horizon.

The video in the media player is taken from the previous report.

The term — a way to get new talent without hiring new employees — was announced by Gartner, a technology research and consulting firm, as one of the nine workplace trends of the year.

This trend has understandably caught people’s attention as it comes amid ongoing fears of a recession and a wave of layoffs in the tech industry.

Here’s what you need to know.

What is silent hire?

According to Emily Rose McRae, senior director of research at Gartner, silent hiring is a strategy companies use to fill gaps without hiring full-time new hires.

Before people get worried, the trend is just a fancy term for downsizing and providing more work for existing employees, McRae said, to be more specific.

READ MORE: Burnt out employees are ‘quietly quitting’ their jobs: what you need to know about the trend

“In silent hiring, we talk about the organization strategically, at the leadership level, looking at the talent they have in the organization and where the critical gaps are, and find ways to fill them,” she said. “It’s an attempt to acquire new skills and capabilities without acquiring new people.”

As an example, McRae said that a company may decide it needs to add five more data scientists to its team in order to reach its strategic goals for the year.

The company can then look at the hiring forecast and see that these five positions could take up to nine months to fill, which would mean they would be unable to meet their 2023 targets.

As a solution, a company may decide to temporarily move five employees from another department, such as data analysts in HR and marketing, to five open data positions, and that’s a quiet hire, McRae explained.

“The idea is that you have a limited amount of talent in your organization and you need to make a call about where they will make the best impact,” McRae said. “In this case, you’re saying, ‘We’re going to deliberately deprioritize analytics support for HR and marketing for the next six months so we can improve the productivity of our data team, and we’re very explicit about that.’ Everyone knows this.”

An important difference with covert hiring, according to Macrae, is that the company openly communicates its priorities to employees and temporarily moves employees to areas that meet those priorities, rather than simply putting employees on extra work instead of hiring more people.

“The company is saying, ‘We’re deliberately deprioritizing this space right now to prioritize another part of the business,'” McRae said.

Why is silent hiring trending in 2023?

The current economic uncertainty is one of the reasons silent hiring is the current trend, McRae said, as companies may be more likely to slow down hiring.

Another reason, she explained, was the widespread shortage of talent.

“We don’t have enough talent for the roles available,” McRae said. “The job report that just came out says that we had the lowest number of applicants in recent months, so we are not in a situation where we find much more talent easily.”

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The lack of talent means it could take months for employers to fill a vacancy, McRae said, and economic uncertainty means companies may deliberately keep their workforce to a minimum.

In both scenarios, companies will turn to existing employees for critical roles, she said.

What if my employer is conducting a silent hiring process?

While the trend in the workplace around new hires may seem daunting, McRae believes that quiet hiring should be both rewarding and reassuring for employees.

“If you’ve been asked to play a completely different role or take on additional responsibilities, they ask you to do so because your work is appreciated,” she said. “They appreciate you enough to say, ‘Please do this for us.’

McRae said the key to quiet hiring is for your employer to tell you directly what’s going on and what’s expected.

This means that you, as an employee, also have the opportunity to learn new skills, perhaps move to another job in the company and negotiate.

“One thing an employee can get is to ask, ‘OK, I’ll do that rotation, but really I want to move there permanently, so how can we do that?'” McRae said, noting that the employee could negotiate that the company pay for additional training or provide a mentor.

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McRae said she encourages employees to use the opportunity to negotiate a one-time bonus or pay increase for the duration of their rotation, or more paid leave or more flexibility if a company says it can’t increase pay.

“An employee might say, ‘If it’s not possible to increase my compensation, can we make it so that I can work from home five days a week, reducing my travel expenses?'” McRae said. “Or: “Can we make it so that I can work flexible hours, which would make the rest of my life easier?”

McRae added that while one-to-one conversations can be intimidating, if you work in a department or team and are asked to switch roles, use that power and address human resources as a group.

For example, McRae said that employees might say, “This is a problem for the entire group. We would like to make sure we have an understanding of this.”

Employees also need to feel empowered to “push” their employer into quietly hiring.

“If your organization has positions that you work for a lot or that require similar skills that you think would be interesting, talk to your manager about the opportunities available,” McRae said. “Could you do some training? Could you change over time? You can push your company towards quiet hiring if you want.”

Copyright © 2023 ABC News Internet Ventures.

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