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The era of mass quitting has given way to something very different: “job hugging.”
That’s what consultants at Korn Ferry are calling the new labor-market trend, where workers are holding onto their jobs “for dear life” despite the whiplash of RTO mandates and a lack of emphasis on workplace loyalty.
“The phrase ‘job hugging’ just kind of coined itself, because of the reluctance of especially top performers to leave where they’re currently at,” Stacy DeCesaro, a managing consultant at Korn Ferry, told Business Insider.
“There was some momentum built up in January, but then the tariffs definitely gave a lot of pause to candidates,” DeCesaro added. “There’s so much market instability, and that just causes fear and doubt among candidates who may be waiting for warmer waters or more favorable market conditions.”
According to the Labor Department’s latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, the share of workers voluntarily leaving their jobs remains low at around 2% this year. This is the lowest quit rate since 2016, aside from when the pandemic began in 2020.
The shift in behavior comes as the US shows signs of slowing job growth, even as unemployment rates remain relatively low. July saw 73,000 new jobs added, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while job growth in May and June has also been revised down by the BLS from what was initially reported.
“Our estimate of trend job growth is now clearly below even that low bar at 30k per month,” Goldman Sachs economics analysts David Mericle and Jessica Rindels wrote in a note on Monday. “Future revisions to job growth are more likely to be negative.”
A ZipRecruiter poll found 38% of job seekers said in the second quarter of 2025 that they aren’t confident there are plenty of jobs available, up from around 26% in the same quarter in 2022.
An early August survey by the Conference Board, a nonprofit business research organization, also found that for the first time since 2020, more CEOs reported plans to shrink their workforce over the next 12 months than expand it, though more are also reporting difficulty in finding qualified workers.
The tendency to stay could also be spurred by the need for higher wages. Even though workplace loyalty has waned, recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta shows that workers who stay in their jobs are seeing faster annual wage growth than those who quit for new roles.
DeCesaro said that while job huggers risk career stagnation and the loss of opportunities to upskill in adjacent roles, this could be a chance for companies to invest in their talents.
“I feel like once we have some more stability, there’s going to be some pent-up resentment and demand for candidates to start making a move, and we could have a mini great resignation coming back up,” said DeCesaro. “So I think now it’s a good time for companies to proactively stymie some of that and have candid conversations with employees.”
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