Forget Quiet Hiring - The Extended Workforce is Loud and Clear

There’s been a lot of noise surrounding Gartner’s Future of Work prediction of ‘quiet hiring’. As is the wont of organisations like Gartner, the desire to create a buzz is stronger than the reality – which is there’s nothing new about quiet hiring.

For me, the part where it fails is the use of the word quiet. Quiet suggests something covert – that was the thought behind the quiet quitting after all. Whereas what is being described here is the value of turning to the extended workforce, and maximising the ways to access skills across a business. Why be quiet about finding a solution to deliver change and growth in your company?

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We’re closer to this at Talmix: after all, our purpose is to unlock the power of this extended workforce, providing companies with the external talent on-demand that fills skills gaps and talent shortages. We’re not alone, like other talent marketplaces, our customer base and network grows each year as more organisations want the fastest way to find the talent they need and that’s demanding new channels.

The only time that this can be described as quiet is when a hiring manager skips central programs as their talent needs become too urgent to ‘follow the rules’ – as I said, that’s covert, not quiet. And most of the time, organisations want to enable both approaches - the hiring flexibility and the managed programmes.

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Increasingly, companies recognise that using extended talent isn’t an occasional call, it’s a sensible workforce strategy. The rise of the independent worker continues, and matching that rich source with the power of an employer brand to create flexible teams, makes independent working a win for everyone. This approach provides the skills to get stuff done, and in turn those skills can transfer to the permanent workforce. That’s also part of Gartner’s quiet hiring prediction – mobilising internal skills - they have to exist before being mobilised.

There’s nothing new about the idea that skills are going to dominate workforce decision-making; it’s been obvious for some time that traditional roles are eroding, that the cycle for new skills becoming critical is diminishing, and these can only lead to skills-based hiring decisions.

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To be clear, I’m not trying to be David to Gartner’s Goliath; I just want to get away from the idea that there is no quiet hiring – companies need to be loud and proud as they find new sources of the best talent and their workforce strategies evolve to embrace flexibility in all areas. And the faster they can fulfil their objectives, the more their entire supply chain and customer base will benefit.

Let’s go for loud skills in 2023!