Will "Quiet Hiring" Benefit Freelancers?
Will "Quiet Hiring" Benefit Freelancers?
With the specter of a recession looming, internal hiring became recruitment du jour.
Last year, “quiet quitting” — satisfying only the specified requirements of one’s job — was all the rage. It spawned a galaxy of hot takes, ranging from indignation to praise.
Quitting outright was still en vogue, referred to as the Great Resignation or the Big Quit. People switched careers, dove into their hobbies, took sabbaticals, and traveled the world.
Now, there’s a new trend: “quiet hiring.”
Quiet hiring refers to tapping internal resources instead of recruiting new talent. It makes sense that companies would want to optimize for cost-effectiveness in the face of possible recession. Still, I can’t help but wonder what will happen to job seekers.
If companies prioritize hiring internally and reallocating existing resources, they will naturally hire fewer external candidates. Consequently, job seekers will have fewer opportunities to pursue. But will employers find everything they need internally?
For the sake of argument, let’s take the workplace trends of the last year or two at face value. If legion workers have quiet-quit, is quiet hiring a viable strategy? If large swathes of the workforce quit-quit and are now looking to return to work, will they have nowhere to go? Could a hiring freeze and a resource shortfall both be in the works?
But the jobs market is strong, isn’t it? Job openings increased 572,000 to 11 million in December, a five-month peak. Leisure and hospitality accounted for three-quarters of the increase, however, which might indicate a seasonal spike related to the holidays. Even so, jobs numbers are doing fine overall.
There is a catch, though: The U.S. Bureau of Labor includes freelancers in its jobs report. This is especially relevant when considering that freelance work continues to grow, now representing 39 percent of the workforce, up from 36 percent the year before, according to Upwork’s Freelance Forward Report. The CEO of Fiverr claims that more than half of the U.S. labor force will be freelance by 2027. Consider the source, of course, but freelance is without question trending upward.
What does this mean for the jobs outlook? At the very least, it means we must consider the changing composition of the labor force when interpreting labor statistics. It’s not as simple as jobs are up or down. It never was, of course, but the expanding freelance marketplace adds variables.
Assuming quiet hiring is a factor, the big question is, will quiet hiring shut out freelancers too, or will freelancers fill the gaps created by a hiring slowdown?
Visit PabloAndreu.com for more of Pablo’s writing.