Quiet hiring: How your people and business can benefit from this important workforce trend

According to Gartner, quiet hiring is one of the top workforce trends for 2023, helping leaders make the most of top talent.

By understanding the impact of quiet hiring and learning how to use it well, you can more effectively develop your team. You can use the resources you have to help your people build careers they love and support the growth of your organisation. 

How can quiet hiring really impact retention, engagement and employee experience? Let’s find out.

What is quiet hiring, and what does it mean for you?

Quiet hiring is about optimising your existing workforce to achieve your future goals.

By providing new opportunities to people who are already part of your team and mission, you’ll avoid the time and cost of hiring and training a new employee, while investing in your people and talent engagement,

This may mean giving more responsibilities to current employees or providing additional training and benefits. In some cases, quiet hiring may involve bringing in a team member from another department. 

For leaders, quiet hiring can be revolutionary. It’s a win-win solution that upskills and retains your existing workforce, provides opportunity and tackles challenges and goals, all at the same time.

Quiet hiring and your employee experience

Quiet hiring can have a powerful impact on your employee experience. 

Research reveals that just 13% of employees are fully satisfied with their experience at work. Quiet hiring allows you to change the experience for your team.

If employee experience relies on the culture of your workplace and offer you provide, making changes can help you improve the way that employees engage with your organisation and their work. 

By adopting a quiet hiring approach, you can respond to employee interests and development goals and provide more positive experiential outcomes that support learning, engagement and enthusiasm about work.

Strengthening your retention strategy

Similarly, quiet hiring can have a profound effect on your long-term talent retention strategy. 

Research shows that at any given time, up to 25% of employees are classified as high-retention-risk. When you apply quiet hiring strategies, you can help your people achieve job mobility within your team. 

Overwhelmingly, today’s talent are looking for the chance to build careers. This means that internal career progression, including associated training and stretch assignments, can be a compelling reason to stay.

What’s more is that quiet hiring could even help you combat the challenge of quiet quitting, allowing you to reward high-performing employees with career progression opportunities that drive greater engagement and keep them invested in your team.

When you use quiet hiring well, you can help your current team feel valued and recognised for their achievements, making them more positive employer brand ambassadors and making them more likely to stay with you. 

How to quiet hire

Like most things, quiet hiring doesn’t have to be complicated. Follow these steps.

Engage and listen your team

Effective quiet hiring starts when you engage your team and listen to employee voices. Talk to your people, and find out more about their skills, career goals and the kind of assignments they may be willing to take on. 

Identify transferable talent

Next, start analysing your talent pool! Understand the way your people work, and learn how to spot professional strengths. Identify skills and attributes that could help your organisation in a specific role or with an upcoming project.

Train your people

Learning is everything. Don’t wait to start upskilling your team. Provide on the job education and training as well as external professional development opportunities that help people grow. Evaluate how learned skills could be applied to work tasks at your organisation. 

Offer an opportunity 

Finally, give your people a chance to show their value! When a new role or project becomes available, look to your team, and give your people the chance to help. Allow people to try something new, and set them up to succeed. 

When quiet hiring isn’t right

Quiet hiring is a good solution, but it isn’t a perfect one in every scenario. Sometimes, your existing talent are not well placed to fill a skills gap in your team. 

When this occurs, you’ll need to turn your focus to talent attraction. 

Need help finding the right people for your organisation and managing the hiring process? Contact the Heart team for support today.