Quiet hiring and staff augmentation – how companies fill skill gaps

When you hear drifting, what do you picture? A boat carried by ocean waves or a Fast & Furious-style car sliding sideways through a corner? I immediately see another form of drifting: talent slowly moving away from their initial roles. No wonder, since I’m immersed in HR issues, and talent drift is a trend that is gaining popularity among organisations.

Talent drift occurs when employees gradually shift into roles they were not originally hired for. On one hand, it may create a valuable opportunity for them to learn new skills. On the other, repeated role stretching can blur expertise. When talent drift becomes the main way to fill skill gaps within an organisation, it is time to stop and ask a practical question: how should we really address those gaps?

Quiet hiring – filling gaps without hiring

One answer may be quiet hiring. The idea is simple: instead of hiring new people, companies reshuffle the team they already have. A product manager temporarily steps into the role of a data analyst, a senior developer becomes a “technical lead for now”, etc.

Take Marta, a senior backend developer. When the DevOps engineer left during a busy product release, hiring a replacement was not an option because it would have taken too long. Instead, Marta was asked to temporarily take over the CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure decisions because she had some experience from a previous project.

Three months later, she is still managing deployments and troubleshooting Kubernetes clusters. Is she happy? Yes! She realised she had drifted into a role she genuinely enjoys and decided to develop in that direction. Most likely, she will not return to her original backend position.

Is Marta’s story just a lucky shot? Not necessarily. Many companies look inward before they reach out to the job market. A McKinsey study shows that around one in five organisations now uses quiet hiring rather than opening new positions. From a management perspective, the reason for that is quite straightforward: internal mobility is usually faster and less costly than external recruitment.

But there is a catch.
Employees are regularly asked to take on responsibilities outside their original role, and it feels as if organisations are solving one skill gap while quietly creating another. The effects are easy to foresee: lower motivation, more context switching and confusion, to name a few.

A curious phenomenon related to this already has its own term: “coffee badging”. Employees show up at the office, grab a coffee, have a quick chat with their workmates, and disappear shortly after. Their aim is just to be seen. Some commentators interpret it as a signal that people feel overloaded or disconnected from their work. I think that quiet hiring adds to it: when new responsibilities keep appearing without a clear role change, engagement starts drifting too.

Staff augmentation – external experts on board

Another way to fill the skill gap is staff augmentation. The first, most popular association with staff augmentation defines it as bringing in more developers to help deliver tasks faster. In fact, staff augmentation can be much more complex: external experts help make better tech decisions, and they take ownership of delivering their part of the work, from requirement analysis through coding, testing, and automation.

And it is no longer just about development capacity – industry reports point out that over 60% of organisations use augmented teams to access specialised skills, particularly in areas such as cloud, AI, and cybersecurity, where building expertise internally takes time. They look for professionals who can step into a project (often with prior domain knowledge, e.g. in logistics, eMobility, or eCommerce) and help shape the solution, not just execute tasks.

What are main advantages of staff augmentation? It allows teams to access expertise quickly, without long recruitment cycles, and without pulling existing employees away from their core roles. It can also reduce context switching and decision delays, especially when the missing skill is critical for moving the project forward.

What to choose: quiet hiring or staff augmentation?

There is no universal answer because both approaches may be beneficial. Let’s change the question from “What to choose?” to “What to choose now?”.

Quiet hiring can unlock hidden potential inside the team, while staff augmentation can protect that potential from being stretched too thin. The real challenge is knowing when one strategy quietly turns into talent drifting and when it’s time to bring in fresh expertise instead.