Job Hugging: What Staying Put Is Really Costing You

A coachee of mine, a director at a large tech company, keeps a spreadsheet of reasons to leave her job. She started it in early 2025. It has grown to 23 rows: a manager she has outgrown, a product she stopped believing in, a promotion cycle that passed her over twice. She showed it to me in a session last month, and then she said the sentence that prompted this article: "I know all of this, and I still haven't applied to a single role in fourteen months."

She has options and she has courage. What she also has is a calculation that feels rational every single morning: the market looks cold, the headlines are full of layoffs, and the job she has, whatever its flaws, pays well and exists. So she holds on. There is now a name for this, and if you spend any time in career conversations you have probably heard it: job hugging.

The numbers say she has plenty of company

Job hugging means staying in a role longer than you otherwise would, driven by security rather than satisfaction or growth. In ResumeBuilder's February 2026 survey of over 2,000 US workers, 57 percent identified as job huggers, up from 45 percent just six months earlier. Monster's research found that 75 percent of employees plan to stay in their current roles through at least 2027, and that 85 percent of workers admit to having job hugged at some point in their careers.

The behavior shows up clearly in the hard data too. The US quits rate sat at 1.9 percent in early 2026, a level not seen since 2016 outside the pandemic, and a world away from the Great Resignation peak of 4.5 million monthly quits in late 2021. The average job search now takes more than five months. People can read a market. When moving looks slow and expensive, they stop moving.

Now, let's be honest here. Choosing stability when 1.17 million people lost their jobs last year, the highest total since 2020, is a reasonable response to real conditions. The coachees I see doing it are capable, employed, often high performers. The question I ask them is a different one: 

Is your stay a strategy, or has it become a hiding place?

FOBO is doing a lot of the gripping in the job market

Underneath the market math sits something more personal. In the ResumeBuilder data, 70 percent of job huggers worry that AI will affect their job security within six months, and 63 percent fear layoffs in the same window. DDI's Global Leadership Forecast gave this feeling a name: FOBO, the fear of becoming obsolete. Their research found frontline leaders are three times more likely than executives to express concern about AI readiness, which matches exactly what I hear in sessions. The people closest to the work see it changing first, and they worry about it first too.

FOBO drives a particular set of behaviors, and I see them weekly. A marketing leader I coach spent last autumn collecting AI certifications at night, four courses in three months, driven by dread more than curiosity, and could not tell me how any of them connected to where she wanted her career to go. Another coachee, a senior finance manager, stopped speaking up in strategy meetings because he assumed anything he said would eventually be benchmarked against a tool. In practice, FOBO looks like frantic credentialing, like silence, and very often like hugging the job you have because it is the one place your obsolescence has not yet been tested.

There is a third force working alongside the market and FOBO, and behavioral science named it decades ago: status quo bias. Samuelson and Zeckhauser's research showed that people disproportionately stick with their current situation even when better alternatives exist, and Kahneman and Tversky's work on loss aversion explains why: 

Potential losses weigh roughly twice as heavily on us as equivalent gains. 

Apply that to a career decision. The known salary, the known manager, the known commute sit on one side of the scale. On the other side sits a better role that remains hypothetical until you land it. Your brain doubles the weight of everything you might lose and discounts everything you might gain, which means the current job wins the internal debate even in years when the market is warm. Add a cold market and FOBO on top, and staying stops being a choice you make and becomes the default you never examine. Naming the bias matters because it tells you the discomfort you feel about moving is partly a measurement error, built into the instrument.

What the job hold is costing you

Here is what the reassuring version of job hugging misses: the workers staying put are paying for it. In the same surveys, over half of job huggers report working longer hours, and significant shares report missed promotions or raises. Employers know people are unlikely to leave, and the leverage shifts accordingly. Meanwhile Gallup puts global employee engagement at just 21 percent, which means a large share of the people gripping their desks have already mentally left the building.

There is also a compounding cost that surveys don't always capture. Careers are built on stretch: new scope, new stakeholders, new problems. Three years of defensive staying, in a role you have already outgrown, can leave you with three years of tenure and six months of growth. When the market eventually warms, and it always does, the person who spent the freeze developing shows up very differently from the person who spent it holding their breath.

Strategic patience or hiding: how to tell which one you are doing

This is the conversation I have most often right now, and the distinction usually comes down to a handful of honest questions:

• Do you have exit conditions, or just exit feelings? Strategic stayers can name what would make them move: a specific role, a market signal, a number, a date. Hiders have a spreadsheet of grievances and no trigger attached to any of them.

  
  

• Is your network active or archived? If the last time you spoke to someone outside your company about work was before the market cooled, your stay has drifted into isolation. Strategic stayers keep relationships warm precisely because they are not searching. It is the cheapest career insurance there is.

  
  

• Are you learning toward something? Collecting certifications out of FOBO keeps you busy without moving you anywhere in particular. The better question is which two or three capabilities your next role, the one you actually want, will require, and whether your current role can be bent to build them.

  
  

• Could you describe your last twelve months as a story of growth? If a recruiter asked what changed in your role since 2024 and the honest answer is "nothing, but I survived the restructures," that is useful information.

Making the job hug work for you

For the coachees who decide, eyes open, that staying is right for now, we turn the hold into an active position. That has looked like: negotiating internal scope instead of external moves, since a stretch project inside a company you know beats a lateral jump into uncertainty; setting a review date, a specific month in the calendar when the stay decision gets re-decided rather than rolling forward by default; doing the positioning work now, the CV, the LinkedIn, the portfolio of results, because the worst time to build these is the week you suddenly need them; and treating AI tools as material to master rather than a verdict to await, which is the only reliable cure for FOBO I have seen. Fear of becoming obsolete shrinks in direct proportion to fluency.

My director with the spreadsheet is still in her job, by the way. The difference is that the spreadsheet now has a 24th row: the conditions under which she leaves, and the date on which we review them. Same job, completely different posture. One version of staying was a slow closing of doors. This version keeps her hand on the handle.

If you do want to move jobs: how to get your feet wet

Some of you reading this already know the answer to the strategy-or-hiding question, and the answer is that you want out. The good news is that a move never has to start with a resignation letter. It starts with small, low-risk tests that rebuild your market confidence and your information at the same time. Here is what I set up with coachees in this position:

• Take three exploratory conversations in the next month. These are coffee chats and informal calls with people doing the work you think you want, with no application attached. You are gathering data about roles, teams, and salary ranges while the stakes are zero. Most people discover the market is warmer for their specific profile than the headlines suggested, and some discover the role they were idealizing is one they no longer want. Both outcomes are wins.

  
  

• Interview for one role you would probably decline. Interviewing is a muscle, and after two or three years of staying put it has atrophied for most people. A live process for a role you are lukewarm on lets you practice answering, negotiating, and being evaluated without the emotional weight of needing it. When the role you genuinely want appears, you arrive warmed up instead of rusty.

  
  

• Talk to two or three recruiters in your field. One conversation each. Ask them what profiles are moving, what the realistic range is for someone with your background, and what would make your CV easier to place. Recruiters give you the market's honest view for free, and being on their radar costs you nothing.

  
  

• Do the positioning work before you need it. CV updated, LinkedIn aligned, two or three quantified wins written down while you still remember the numbers. The worst week to build these assets is the week a real opportunity appears with a five-day deadline.

  
  

• Test the work itself where you can. An advisory project, a volunteer board seat, a fractional or freelance engagement, an internal secondment. If your possible next chapter is a different function, industry, or working model, a small real sample tells you more than six months of thinking about it.

  
  

• Set a passive watch. Job alerts for your two or three target titles, reviewed once a week for fifteen minutes. You are calibrating what appears, how often, and at what level, so that when the right one shows up you recognize it as right rather than wondering.

None of these commit you to leaving. All of them convert vague wanting into information, and information is what shrinks the fear that keeps the hug in place.

Worth sitting with this week

• If you have stayed in your role through the last two years, was that a decision you made or one that made itself?

• What would need to be true, specifically, for you to move? Can you write it down in one sentence?

• Which skill would make you harder to replace and easier to hire, and what in your current role could build it?

If you are somewhere in the middle of a hold-or-move decision and want a thinking partner, follow me Merve K. Hokamp for more on careers and leadership dynamics, and reach out to discuss how we can work together.