Harnessing quiet hiring to boost efficiency

“Quiet hiring” is yet another one of the trending terms that have been floating around lately. While similar terms, such as “quiet quitting” and “the Great Resignation”, were negative, quiet hiring is a positive term that can be harnessed to boost efficiency.

Cornerstone chief international officer Vincent Belliveau joined HR Leader to discuss the trend and why it’s important for businesses to take advantage of it.

“I discussed this with CHROs and CEOs; they really struggled to find the skills they are looking for in the marketplace. And therefore, a way to address the challenge is to start building those skills with their people,” explained Mr Belliveau.

“[Quiet hiring] is a mix of internal mobility, sometimes people change roles, but also just upskilling and rescaling your people, leveraging their interests, and then bringing them towards the skills that you actually need in the business.”

Mr Belliveau noted that effectively utilising quiet hiring to upskill and reskill staff requires a leader to sit back and analyse the business and those in it.

“A detailed analysis of people’s interests and the AI today helps to achieve that. They are able to move some people who might have been warehouse people to computer programmer roles, because they do that in their spare time. But nobody would have known before that this person actually had interest in doing that and could be developed with a little bit of further investment into that,” he said.

“There are many examples of that. So, this notion of quiet hiring, progressively grooming you’re your internal workforce towards the capabilities you need today and tomorrow is very important.”

The key concept used in quiet hiring is agility. Becoming an agile company is crucial to the future of work, said Mr Belliveau, as the workforce is still reeling from the effects of the pandemic and processes adapt.

Mr Belliveau continued: “The business leaders that I work with all face increased uncertainty. So COVID-19 happened and changed everything super fast. But even post-COVID-19, the level of geopolitical uncertainty, environmental uncertainty, and uncertainty around business models.

“Look at ChatGPT; it can automate so many roles so quickly, unforeseen three months ago. The acceleration is such that organisations need to be very, very agile. So you need to be able to progressively and quickly build the skills that you need with your people.”