What comes after quiet quitting and presenteeism?
Over the last year, endless terms describing employee dissatisfaction at the office have started going viral on the internet. Some, like “quiet quitting,” have trickled down into even the highest corporate ranks and become a regular part of the lexicon.
A TikTok video about “quitting the idea of going above and beyond” that 24-year-old engineer Zaid Khan posted on TikTok last summer resonated with hundreds of thousands workers but also spooked resentful bosses who wrote about how those who quiet quit may soon find themselves “quiet fired.”
Next came “quiet hiring” or employers looking to gain new skills or workers without hiring a full-time employee — while this is a predictable occurrence when economic times turn less prosperous, HR professionals recently saw an increase in employers calling it “quiet hiring” rather than “watching costs” or “not having the budget.”
The term “resenteeism,” or workers who stay in a job they do not like while growing more and more resentful, has also recently started to make the rounds on the internet.
Here’s Why Employers Need To Worry About Rage Applying
The latest toxic workplace term is the opposite of staying in a job but doing nothing to change it — rage applying, or spontaneously sending in resumes or applications to new jobs after a stressful day at the current one, first started getting mentioned by some TikTok users with day jobs last year.
“I got mad at work and rage applied to like 15 jobs and then I got a job that gave me a $25,000 raise and it’s a great place to work,” Canadian TikTok user @redwees told over 370,000 followers in a December video. “So keep rage applying. It’ll happen.”
Google Trends (GOOGL) – Get Free Report data shows a significant spike in people typing “rage applying” into the search engine in mid-January. The term quickly started to gather speed and caught the attention of human resources managers who confirmed seeing a higher number of employees naming a better job offer as their reason for leaving their role.
“People have impulsively applied for jobs during a moment of frustration for years,” Jenna-lea Kelland writes for Recruiting Daily. “However, the trending hashtag resonates with Gen Zs and millennials who have had enough of resolving themselves to jobs that make them desperate for the weekend.”
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Despite It All, There Is Still a Labor Shortage
While the Great Resignation is a 2021 phenomenon that has now slowed down amid a looming recession, overall unemployment is still at a low unseen since 1969. As a result, many employees no longer feel the need to stay in a job that isn’t working due to fear of not finding another one while employers in specialized fields have to compete for top workers by offering higher salaries and better benefits than competitors.
Recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that accommodation, food, retail, and transportation were some of the industries workers left the fastest — the former lost an average of 773,600 workers between April and August 2022.
“Most rage-applying occurs when individuals channel pent-up feelings of frustration and rage into action,” clinical psychologist Dr. Carla Marie Manly told Reader’s Digest. “People tend to rage-apply when they feel as if they’ve been under-appreciated, passed over, or stuck in a toxic work environment.”
