Silent hiring: why managers hire from within their own ranks
In a tight labor market, employers are looking to upskill their existing workforce
From Our Editorial Team we always look for the latest news provided by the entrepreneurship and business schools section published daily by the prestigious Financial Times.
This first article that we have chosen for today’s topic has been written by Bethan Staton, deputy editor of FT Work & Careers, and by Emma Jacobs, who is also the editor of this section, although she was previously for FT.com’s companies, markets and world desks (FT.com companies, markets and global offices)
Lynda Gratton, an academic at London Business School, spends her time advising employers on how to better organize their workforce. But she doesn’t think much about jobs anymore: Lately, she’s noticed, specific roles have been replaced by lists of desired skills and character traits.
“Now, when I work with companies, the matrix they have is not jobs, but skills,” she says. Employers are not looking for specific roles, but rather people who can be creative, experiment with new ideas or manage complex stakeholders. «Don’t get hung up on job titles—ask, what are the skills that will give you opportunities to grow?»
One in 16 workers worldwide could have to change occupations by 2030
As their roles become obsolete, according to consulting firm McKinsey, and nearly nine in 10 executives say they face looming skills gaps. Faced with the need to acquire new and developing skills, many employers choose to retrain their own workers rather than hire them externally.
Emily Rose McRae, senior analyst at human resources firm Gartner, calls this “silent hiring.” As a tight labor market makes it harder to find outside expertise, managers identify who on the payroll has emerging or existing skills, provide them with training, and reallocate their responsibilities to meet new needs.
Look within the company’s own ranks
«Successful organizations will be those that look not only at the recruitment market, but also at their own ranks,» says Sander van ‘t Noordende, chief executive of human resources group Randstad.
At advertising company Ogilvy UK, for example, a social media and influencer team that once served a niche market of cult beauty brands is growing rapidly. The advertising company is helping employees adapt to new skills demands through peer-to-peer learning: younger staff with influencer experience are paired with colleagues from traditional advertising to share knowledge.
“Internal possibilities are opening up,” says Fiona Gordon, CEO of Ogilvy UK
She believes employers must closely watch emerging trends and be willing to increase investment. «Every once in a while you have to make a bet.»
The approach requires managers to be in “problem-solving mode,” says McRae
Where they don’t have a database on staff skills, for example, they could map experience by tracking who has used certain software.
Some employers have embarked on ambitious training efforts. Professional services company Accenture, for example, has trained 600,000 employees in basic artificial intelligence and 250,000 in generative AI. At the JLL real estate group, 30,000 employees have learned sustainable real estate practices.
But not all entrepreneurs are taking the initiative
“Many private companies rely on their ability to buy talent rather than thinking about developing it internally,” says Lizzie Crowley, senior skills policy adviser at the CIPD, the professional body for human resources and people development. «[They] don’t have a short-term strategic focus, much less a long-term one.»
And training – or “retraining” – has generally languished among employers’ priorities in recent years. The amount UK employers invested in skills per employee has fallen 28% since 2005, according to the Learning and Work Institute.
Employers seem not to be doing enough
Sebastian Dettmers, CEO of global recruitment firm StepStone Group, warns that while some large companies are creating good skills strategies, employers overall are “clearly not” doing enough.
“The main point is to understand what skills [staff] will need in the future,” he says. «It’s always a challenge when interest rates are high, when there are low growth rates and recessions, but that means investing.»
At communications company Cisco, Chintan Patel, chief technology officer for the UK and Ireland, identifies data governance, AI strategy and managing the core infrastructure of AI systems as key areas for new skills.
Strengthen security
Basic online security (password hygiene or responsible use of wireless networks) could also be reinforced.
“One of the biggest things we hear from our customers and the industry is this overall challenge around AI skills and leveraging,” he says. It is “fundamentally” about recruiting, retaining and developing the right people.
Saadia Zahidi, director general of the World Economic Forum, says “deeply human traits” such as analytical thinking, leadership and flexibility, as well as technological and ecological skills, will be essential.
As more jobs are created, automation will make others redundant
Four in five employers told the WEF (World Economic Forum) that, in addition to investing in training, they would act faster to automate some of the work, which would bring “displacement, augmentation and emergence of new roles at the same time,” says Zahidi.
This requires delicacy on the part of managers. A haphazard approach can be problematic for industrial relations: for example, announcements about future job losses may appease investors but demoralize staff.
Take into account the broader context of the business and labor market
Dan Lucy of the Institute of Labor Studies advises organizations to engage in future workforce planning exercises every two to three years, considering the broader context of the business and labor market, the capabilities needed to achieve objectives and what what that means for roles and skills.
Allison Horn, head of talent transformation at Accenture, sees an “ongoing struggle within organizations where they have invested in training, but have not invested time and resources in helping people learn how to learn. “People need the right resources, encouragement, context and time to develop new skills.”
Without the ability to accurately predict which jobs will be most in demand in the future, the ability to move into new jobs and retrain quickly could be the most valuable skill of all.
«We’ll need people who can adapt,» McRae says. “Now people could specialize in an area that, in five years, won’t be done at all.”
Silent Hiring and Firing: Employer Responses to Silent Resignations
Elsier Otachi is a B2B copywriter for eCommerce and SaaS companies. What is SaaS? Software as a Service (SaaS) is a cloud-based software model that delivers applications to end users through an Internet browser. SaaS providers host services and applications so that customers can access them on demand.
His 8+ years of content marketing experience involves creating in-depth, research-backed thought leadership content for HR technology brands including Secretary and HR.com, as well as technical reviews of HR software. Elsier has qualifications in professional, technical, business and scientific writing, as well as robotic process automation (RPA). Outside of work, Elsier enjoys reading a good book, spending time with her family, or playing her favorite music playlists.
What she has taught us to quietly quit about hiring high-value talent and toxic management.
What factors are present?
– Long hours of work.
– Inadequate payment.
– Employee burnout.
– Decreasing commitment.
All of these factors contributed to the increase in silent abandonment. While business leaders are still deciding what to do about silent abandonment, and even what it is, new spin-off phrases have already emerged.
Certain Questions to Ask About Hiring and Quiet Firing
– Can it be said that the results of abandonment emerge?
– What is silent hiring?
– What is silent shooting?
– What are employee engagement crises?
– Should we rethink our attitude towards work?
Silent resignation occurs when employees continue to make minimal effort to keep their jobs, but do not go the extra mile for their employer. This could mean not speaking up in meetings, not volunteering to do tasks, and refusing to work overtime. It could also result in increased absenteeism.
Whether you agree or disagree with the silent resignation movement, it has certainly brought some important issues to light.
– Employers are reevaluating the experience they offer employees.
– Employees are reconsidering their work-life balance.
– HR leaders are learning a lot about what workers want.
Silent resignation involves workers rejecting overtime and additional responsibility in favor of their free time and mental health.
Because of how normalized superior performance has become, many employers expect workers to do more than what is described in their job and are concerned about this recent change.
But there is also a cost to employees who take a step back. They lose the opportunity to be seen as ambitious, high-value talents in the eyes of recruiters.
What is silent hiring?
Since quietly quitting results in workers walking away from additional responsibilities, what happens to workers who step up? They hire them quietly.
Silent hiring is a hiring method that focuses on high-performing talent to advance their careers.
With good reason. High performers achieve 400% more production than the average employee. Taking care of these individuals, singling them out for promotion, and showering them with high salaries and benefits makes good business sense. In fact, Google has included it in its hiring strategy.
Quiet quitters who, by definition, do not take on more than the required workload and do not lead initiatives that are not necessary, are also not quietly hired. It stands to reason that any employee who wants to reach senior management probably needs to be a high performer. Quietly quitting is a sure way to fall behind.
To be clear, being outperformed by high performers is not the same as being quietly fired.
What is silent shooting?
Quiet dismissal is a distressing term that came to light shortly after the world learned about silent quitting. It refers to toxic leadership in which a manager withholds guidance, opportunities for career advancement, and praise from workers to drive them to the point of actually quitting. In other words, it’s the exact opposite of best practices for managing layoffs.
While silent dismissal is not necessarily related to the silent abandonment of an individual, it can be a form of retaliation. A quid pro quo of minimal input from both parties that leads to a parting of ways.
However, an employee who goes beyond her job description can still be quietly fired simply due to a poor management culture. No need to send a funny goodbye message to that boss when he leaves.
The best solution to getting fired quietly is to confront management and take a clear stance.
Engaged employees at their desks
Employee engagement crises. According to Gallup, only 34% of employees were engaged, while 16% were actively disengaged from their job and workplace during 2021. This compares to the 36% engaged and 14% disengaged workers reported in 2020.
This slight drop in engagement coincided with the pandemic and the Great Resignation, in which a historically high number of 47.4 million people voluntarily left their jobs to look for a better job in 2021. And another 40% consider leaving their current jobs in the next 3 to 6 months.
A Disengaged Workforce is Bad for Business
As Adam Grant, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says: “When they don’t feel interested, people eventually stop caring.”
But do quietly quitting and disengaging mean the same thing?
How do you achieve silent resignation?
Ben Travis, founder of HR Chief, recently conducted a survey on what people understood it meant to quit quietly. While most agreed that it’s about setting healthy boundaries so that work doesn’t infringe on an employee’s life, 43% of respondents understood it differently. They perceive a movement of workers actively avoiding work or performing substandard work.
Survey Results About What It Means to Quietly Quit
While individual workers may have their own intentions, the general stance is that quietly quitting, by definition, is not an action taken to harm the company. Quiet quitters fulfill their job duties and may even excel at their jobs, but they do not work overtime to do so and do not accept jobs that are not theirs.
That is the essence of silently giving up:
-a cultural movement against busyness that consists of limiting workload to what is necessary instead of putting in extra effort. -It doesn’t entirely mean that the employee has disengaged, is shirking responsibility, or doesn’t care about his or her job.
He also poses the following question:
If an employee is perceived as not meeting the duties of the job description, is his or her performance poor or is his or her job description incomplete?
Kathy Caprino, author and global career and leadership coach, says that quietly quitting is refraining from «…doing work that you believe is above and beyond what you were hired to do and not being compensated for it.»
While quietly quitting may seem like a job boycott to employers, in reality, the employee’s goal is to separate his identity from her job. Is quietly quitting a bad idea if it allows employees space to take care of their mental health and avoid burnout?
The benefits of quitting silently
While it may be disconcerting for employers to see high-performing employees leaving the office on time for a change, good things can come from a quiet resignation.
