'It felt like the Hunger Games had started': Employees are 'loud working' in an effort to secure their jobs

• Out: quiet quitting. In: loud working. Workers are loudly professing just how much they're doing.
• It's a shift from the bare minimum era, with workers clamoring for visibility in an uncertain market.
• Now, workers feel like they're competing to fend off layoffs or build job security.

It's time to get loud about work.

After the era of quiet quitting — workers showing up, doing their jobs, and not much beyond that — the job market's pendulum has shifted. Job-hopping is harder; layoffs feel like a constant threat even as mass job cuts haven't yet hit the bulk of the economy.

And for the employees who now feel more stuck in place, some are now "loud working" — trying to ensure their work is visible and gets noticed. They hope that showing off to their bosses and colleagues will help them get promotions and avoid layoffs.

Other people are "loud working" by focusing on building their personal brands online — showcasing their work rather than letting it speak for itself. Some hope that in an uncertain economy, visibility will improve their career prospects — and help them dominate LinkedIn or other platforms' algorithms.

Vicki Salemi, a career expert with the jobs site Monster, said that loud working can involve making sure that holding on to one's current job doesn't lead to stagnation. Salemi said employees have to be more visible and be more vocal about their achievements, rather than just keeping their heads down and focusing on completing tasks.

"Leaving may feel risky, so workers may concentrate more energy on demonstrating their value internally where they already are," she said.

Working louder, not harder

Abhinav Bohra, an applied scientist at Amazon, said one strategy that he believes helped him earn multiple promotions at the company was learning to "read what the room wants."

If there were 10 problems his team was working on, he would try to identify the two or three that his manager most wanted solved — and focus more of his efforts on them.

"Once you solve the critical problem, you automatically get visibility," he said.

For some workers, that visibility might feel like the only thing between them and a layoff.

A former Meta employee who was laid off earlier this year said the competition for the spotlight intensified in recent years as the company went through layoffs and restructurings.

He saw coworkers try to take on as much work as possible. Some even tried to take over someone else's work, he said. Their goal, it seemed to him, was to get recognized and earn good reviews.

"It felt like the Hunger Games had started," he said. "Everyone was trying to take on as much work as possible and get as much spotlight as they could."

The employee felt that pressure himself. When he was asked to give a presentation but had little material to work with, he said he stretched it into a long presentation full of "fluff."

"It felt like I was trying to make something out of nothing, but I wanted it to look like I'd actually done the work," he said.

One potential downside of loud working is that if it's being done constantly, it might backfire, Salemi said. If you're vocalizing every accomplishment, even if it's not notable, or dominating meetings, taking credit for a collaborative assignment, or focusing on marketing your work instead of accomplishing tasks, that can be an issue.

"You want to make sure that you're not leading to burnout or grabbing credit where credit is not due and constantly tooting your own horn," Salemi said. "There's a tactfulness about it."

A current Big Tech employee said layoffs at her company last year changed how she and her coworkers approached their jobs.

"Everyone on my team started putting in more effort than what they used to do to show, 'Hey, I am an important resource,'" she said.

But some people also became more selective about the work they took on. The employee said she was left with most of the responsibility for a lower-visibility project after a colleague shifted their focus to a project with more senior leadership exposure.

Making your work talents known to the world

Sarah Rilling, 37, has cornered the market on a very specialized niche: "chief of staff" posting. She posts daily on her LinkedIn — sometimes even twice a day — with a lesson about what chiefs of staff do and what they should know.

Her goal wasn't necessarily job hunting, but instead bringing greater attention to an undercovered role. Even so, a few recruiters or chief human resource officers have reached out, saying that they saw her posts or comments. She recently landed a new role due, in part, to her posting.

"It is, I won't lie, a very good gain if you're either trying to do consulting work or if you're looking for a new role," she said. "Putting yourself out there does position you better because they see your skills without having to see your résumé."

And beyond LinkedIn followers, Salemi said that being louder can be a good skill for workers concerned about layoffs, or those who want to move on to better opportunities.

"You're developing the skillset of amplifying your accomplishments and being able to articulate them in a tactful and meaningful way that's valuable to employers," Salemi said.

Benjamin Chipman, a 25-year-old brand marketer and creator, has found posting on TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube has bolstered his career — TikTok, he said, has been surprisingly useful for networking.

His loud working — he posts about what his company does, and content distribution technique — has garnered DMs from firms trying to hire their own in-house content creators. Some companies want to hire folks expressly to loud work.

Chipman said there's real demand from firms for workers communicating via video about what they do and why it matters. It's another way that loud working bolsters Chipman's own stability; he said that being tied to his own company publicly makes him just a bit more secure.

"If I got laid off tomorrow, how am I finding a job? Your average person when they get laid off and posts to LinkedIn is hitting within their network and maybe a little bit beyond as people share," Chipman said. "But in reality, if you've been releasing thought leadership or if I post on TikTok and I've been talking about this idea that how I show up in the workplace matters and my tips and tricks for networking and that kind of thing, there's more people in my network."