Jobless and they’re loving it
Public displays of resignation: Saying ‘I quit’ loud and proud as they walk away from work
For Gabby Ianniello, it was the blisters from putting on stilettos every morning for her real estate job, which had called employees back to the office last fall.
For Tiffany Knighten, it was finding out that a teammate’s annual salary was more than $10,000 higher than hers for a role at her level.
They were fed up. They were ready to resign. And they wanted their TikTok followers to know.
“My mental health welcoming me back after leaving c*rporate america,” read the caption on Knighten’s video posted in September, which featured her wearing a hat that said, “I Hate It Here,” and dancing to Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next.”
America’s quitting rate — the percentage of workers voluntarily leaving their jobs — is historically high, reaching 3% this fall. It is also exceptionally visible.
People are celebrating their resignations in Instagram reels or “QuitToks.” They’re turning to the Reddit forum R/antiwork, where subscriptions ballooned this year, to gloat about being free from their 9-to-5 jobs. They’re tweeting screenshots of texts to their bosses declaring they have quit.
“People have told me: ‘Sis, I quit my job. Let’s go get drinks,’ ” said Knighten, a 28-year-old Black woman. She said she faced persistent microaggressions in her previous workplace and left to run her own communications agency called Brand Curators. “Everyone is loud and proud to say they let go of what wasn’t serving them.”
There once was a time when broadcasting the decision to quit a job might have seemed unwise, or at least uncouth. Career coaches traditionally advised their clients not to disparage former employers online. Though there was always a subset of workers who quit loudly on principle, recruiters often raised their eyebrows at candidates who’d gone public about negative experiences in their previous roles.
But after more than a year of laboring through a pandemic, protests over racial justice, and all the personal and societal tumult that followed those events, some workers are ready to reject professional norms and vent.
“People are frustrated, exhausted, triggered,” said J.T. O’Donnell, founder of the career coaching platform Work It Daily.
If quitters think they can punch back at old bosses without fear of alienating potential future employers, they might be right.
The supply-demand curve of the labor market is working in their favor, and employers are growing less choosy. The share of ZipRecruiter posts that require “no prior experience” has jumped to 22.9% this year from 12.8% in 2020.
The share requiring a bachelor’s degree fell to 8.3% from 11.4%. Some parts of the United States are seeing significant gaps between job openings and job seekers — Nebraska, for example, has 69,000 positions unfilled and 19,300 unemployed people. Experiences that might have once hurt a job seeker’s prospects, like having taken time off for child care, are being forgiven.
Some career coaches are cringing at the rush to take resignation stories public. Many warned that hiring managers consider posts about former employers to be a red flag. Others noted that the current labor shortage, with the workforce down by about 3 million people, won’t be permanent.
“This kind of thing pendulums back and forth,” O’Donnell said.