Quiet Hiring Leads To Quiet Quitting

Quiet hiring, in scarce circumstances, might be needed. However, if you are an employer, be it a company, a non-profit, an academic institution, a service industry, a medical provider, or even a small business, you should consider the negatives that will come with utilizing this method. The negatives hold true especially for organizations that want recognition as the innovators, the best in their field, or the places of most significant opportunity.

In recent years, the "quiet hiring" concept has gained popularity in some organizations, though it has been around for a long time. This approach involves conducting hiring processes without publicizing job openings, keeping the interview process confidential, and minimizing communication with current employees about new hires. Quiet hiring can be represented by looking outside without posting anything internally, but it can also happen internally.

Quiet hiring internally is not the same as succession planning. Openness and clear qualifications that are not arbitrary build trust, eagerness, and job satisfaction because everyone can work toward them. Succession planning for a role done with transparency is a relatively positive method. In fact, companies that are incredibly successful in employee engagement, innovation, and workplace happiness often are phenomenal at succession planning when it is done openly.

While the intention behind quiet hiring may be to reduce distractions and maintain confidentiality, it can have negative consequences that undermine team dynamics and organizational culture because it leads to resentment and distrust. Those lower creativity, innovation, and, ultimately, morale. We will explore how this can lead to quiet quitting (where individuals are unwilling to put in any extra effort and save their energy for those they see as willing to invest in them).

Group Think

A powerful tool to avoid group thinking is to bring in a diverse background of individuals. During quiet hiring, you tend to have limited involvement from others. When we are limiting, especially in a secrecy style, what you will find is group thinking becomes easier. If that is applied during the hiring of a new individual, it often results in someone that you feel thinks as you do. It is a natural outcome that limits the potential for diverse thought.

When a job is widely posted, internally and externally, you often have more voices about the role being considered. If we take a position for middle management, you can hear from the hiring person, some people that would be adjacent to the role, and people that would report to that role. Those varied opinions help to ensure that diversity in thought can take place.

It is worth noting that an internal candidate can still bring diverse thoughts. If we are stepping away for a moment from a succession plan for a role, someone within the organization can still bring various views with the bonus of having a feel for the culture. Consider a maintenance person applying to work within IT that has been taking computer courses that you didn’t know about but their current manager did. Their knowledge of the company and their education have value. Their different view of having worked in maintenance has value by being able to reframe the current methods to allow for innovation for a better IT team or network potentially. That wouldn’t be possible to unearth in quiet hiring.

Mistrust

Trust is the most expensive and unstable type of currency. It takes extreme amounts of time, energy, and vulnerability to create, but it can vanish instantly with just an accusation, let alone proof. To earn it back requires twice the expense as before with half of the return.

Let’s explore that maintenance to an IT individual that later finds out that a new person was hired and no one knew of the opportunity. They had been working hard and had communicated that they would like to be considered if an opportunity opened up. Their manager couldn’t help them know about the opening because no one beyond a few people knew it was an option. The maintenance person may or may not believe their manager about knowing. The seeds of mistrust have now been planted through the quietness.

When an individual feels like they have been working hard and missed out on an opportunity, even though they had done their best to make others aware, they certainly will share it. It is common for mistrust to be communicated quickly among inner circles. This expressed ‘slight by the organization’ creates a compounding effect that can lead to not just the maintenance person in our example pulling back their energy but an entire department. Therefore, quiet quitting and people leaving are a natural outcome of quiet hiring.

Lower Creativity & Innovation

Beyond what we have already discussed, there is a direct effect of quiet hiring that damages the potential for an organization’s creativity (the ideas) and ability to innovate (the process of bringing the ideas to life).

Currently, 60% of CEOs, according to a study by IBM, consider creativity to be the #1 trait needed in the next generation of leaders. I will be the first to tell you that we are all creative while also telling you that less than 20% of people feel creative. Out of that group, 10% feel that they are permitted to be creative at work. A paradox, that is actually simple to solve, has been created in potential supply versus demand in creativity.

Solving the paradox happens by bringing out creativity. Creativity needs openness, encouragement, demonstration, empowerment, energy, and trust in order to thrive. When all of these are in place, organizations become places where people want to come to work. They know that while 20% of their job might be lackluster in terms of their tasks, the remaining 80% more than makes up for it. When you undergo quiet hiring, you directly eliminate openness and trust while indirectly lowering energy. This is a self-inflicted lowering of creativity, thus the paradox.

If you bring out the minimal ideas from people and only get a few people to offer up any idea, you certainly will not be innovative. You will get marginally better ideas that don’t bring out the energy in your markets. You also will now start to demonstrate the company’s lower creativity internally as just another workplace, adding to the paradox.

Morale

Another part of this dilemma is when quiet hiring brings in someone new. Beyond not understanding the culture, a new person often feels the need to make an immediate impact to show they were the right choice. They have not built trust, and frankly, they might be resented through no fault of their own. There is a good chance they will not have the needed interaction time before trying to insert their ideas into projects. If a project has already kicked off and a plan has been established, they could derail it with their interjection. This derailment creates that feeling again for those that have worked on it as not being valued.

The morale of an individual, team, department, or organization is based on the ability to accomplish things that deliver value. When people put effort into anything, which is changed by someone who has not earned their trust, like a new person, morale goes down. The difference with morale lowering is it becomes a cascading infection. It is not limited to just the individuals directly involved or the ones that discuss their dissatisfaction as above. It becomes a force onto itself that starts to become so palpable that the consumers of your offering can begin to notice. Now you have employees and customers quiet quitting.