A cute new term for a morbid reality has cropped up online, describing workers who cling to their jobs out of fear about reentering the dismal job market: "Job hugging."
Anyone who has searched for a job in the last year knows the fears — companies post positions they have no intention of filling, others are terminating workers in favor of AI, and many are combining multiple jobs into one position, asking for uber candidates willing to work three times as much for the pay of a single role.
In many ways, the "job hugging" trend is a reversal of the so-called "great resignation" of the pandemic era, when workers felt safe walking away from positions they didn't want, confident they'd find work elsewhere.
Those days are long gone.
“Oh my goodness! I wouldn’t even say it’s competitive anymore right now. It’s just application after application being put out with either immediate rejection or ghosting all the way," one woman searching for work told Boston 25 News.
The market is especially tough on recent graduates, who can't possibly hope to meet the inflated requirements demanded by senior-level job postings, but also can't find lower-level roles, as few workers are willing to leave those positions.
“I’m definitely concerned. I’m like one-year post-grad, and while I have a job, I know a lot of my friends have been really struggling with searching for a job," another woman told the broadcaster.
Mary Cavanaugh, a senior vice president for career management at Keystone Partners, told the outlet that job hugging was driven by fear, and noted that in some cases "complacency is seeping in."
Another factor driving job hugging is likely the lack of incentive to hop around. After the death of the pension in the majority of U.S. workplaces, the common-sense strategy for increasing pay wasn't to wait for a raise, but to hop to a new job and negotiate a higher rate than what you were leaving behind.
But, according to a report released this year from the Atlanta Fed, workers who stayed put in their jobs were achieving about the same pay increases as those who jumped around. The data looked at wage increases for job hoppers and job huggers in January and February, and found that those who stayed had their pay increased by 4.6 percent, while those who hopped made marginally more at 4.8 percent.
All of the job applications, interviews, onboarding, and new skill acquisition — just for a 0.2 percent pay bump over workers who simply stayed the course.
Two years prior, job hoppers could expect a 7.7 percent wage increase compared to the 5.5 percent increase job huggers received, according to Fortune.
Cavanaugh warned that while hugging may be easier than trying to get back out into the volatile job market, it was still safer to make a move than to be forced to move by circumstances like layoffs.
“One of the negatives of job hugging is if you stay too long and you’re doing it out of fear and complacency, that’s not helping your career or the organization,” she said.
Marie Unger, the CEO of Emergencies International, noted in a piece for Forbes that while high job retention is often seen as an indicator of engagement of a company's workforce, that isn't necessarily the case when employees are only staying out of fear.
"When employees are only staying out of fear, organizations may find significant levels of disengaged staff members, who can cost companies 18% of their annual salary," she wrote.
Unger suggested that there were ways for companies to benefit from the trend and to actually serve their employees who are choosing to stay. Citing a Udemy Workplace Boredom study, she noted that 80 percent of respondents felt that having opportunities to learn and develop their skills would help them feel more engaged at their companies.
She also noted that 90 percent of respondents to a Harvard Business Review Publishing Corporate Learning survey said that their employees and executives felt that their work should provide some purpose to their lives, as 40 or more hours a week doing something that ultimately doesn't matter isn't a great way to build employee engagement.
Unger recommended that businesses "elevate purpose" by communicating why their jobs have meaning and providing ways for employees to feel as though their contributing to that purpose, rather than just acting as cogs in a larger profit-seeking machine.
