HR practitioners remember the chaos of 2022. Quit rates reached historic highs, and job openings outnumbered unemployed workers two to one.
Shortly after the pandemic, thousands of employees waltzed out of their companies into remote jobs paying 15% more. Depending on your perspective, it was a worker’s paradise or an HR nightmare. So many open recs to fill. New hire salaries climbing to obscene heights.
Then something shifted. The music slowed, and everyone found a chair. What replaced the churn of the Great Resignation is a labor market so still and silent journalists gave it another name: the Big Stay.
Workers are holding onto their cubicles with both hands, and voluntary quits have fallen off a cliff.
Some might think HR is rejoicing the calm. They’re not. Or at least, they shouldn’t be.
Consultancies like Korn Ferry point out the risks of “job hugging.” They worry employees are sitting on “comfortable perches,” just waiting for the moment to jump. They also fret job hugging’s impact on career progression.
For employees and job seekers alike, voluntary turnover is a feature, not a bug, of healthy labor market: people in, people out, the rungs on the ladder moving.
Right now, those rungs are stalled. The whole market feels like a roller coaster frozen mid-climb.
The Beveridge Curve (a plot of job openings and unemployment) gives statistical shape to our current labor market.
Economists are squinting at it for a signal. For the last two years, the curve hasn’t looked like a curve. It’s a vertical line with far fewer job openings, but without the expected shift in unemployment.
This makes workforce planning all the more confusing.
What’s going on with job growth and unemployment?
The Beveridge Curve is simple. Plot job vacancies on the Y axis, unemployment on the X axis, and connect the dots over time.
The line that emerges tends to a downward slope: when openings are plentiful, unemployment tends to be low, and vice versa.
But the curve can make alarming moves. And when it does, it’s telling us that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the standard equation of fewer jobs and higher unemployment. Or more jobs and less unemployment.
It's what made the pandemic era striking. The curve lurched violently outward at the end of the pandemic. Unemployment remained stubbornly high as many workers simply sat things out, while employers frantically posted into the void.
What the BLS data shows now is something else: the curve sliding quietly down the Y-axis. Job openings have fallen steadily from their 2022 peak of 7.4% down to 3.9% as of December.
Unemployment has crept up from 3.5% to 4.4%. But we’re not seeing as much unemployment as we would expect. Employers are posting fewer jobs, workers aren’t quitting, and the Beveridge Curve resembles a vertical line instead of its typical curve.
Whether this constitutes a soft landing or the early chapters of a recession is genuinely unclear. The curve isn’t flashing red yet. It’s just drifting slowly and steadily downwards — moving slightly to the right, but not by much.
Why turnover is healthy
It sounds perverse. HR spent the better part of 2021 and 2022 begging employees to stay, constructing elaborate retention programs, handing out higher market adjustments, and refashioning perks as “culture.”
Now, quietly, some of those same teams are looking at their workforce and wishing some people would leave.
Not every employee. Certainly not top performers. Just enough to get the gears turning again.
The reason is structural, not anti-worker. A healthy organization and labor market needs a certain amount of voluntary turnover. Without it, things go stale. Skills atrophy as workers become complacent. And internal mobility stalls. As Korn Ferry and others note, a lack of voluntary departures challenges career progression.
There’s also the question of performance. A high retention rate can mask dysfunction. A company shouldn’t have a low voluntary turnover rate and low employee performance. If these two things are true simultaneously, retention isn’t a success metric but a warning.
A healthy voluntary turnover rate varies considerably by industry. For those in Hospitality, 20% may be the norm, while Government is considerably lower. According to our 2026 Compensation Best Practices Report, the median voluntary turnover in 2025 was 8%, which is exceedingly low historically.
This is the paradox the Big Stay has handed HR: the same stability that looked good a couple years ago doesn’t apply anymore. Workers who feel stuck are not thriving. They have made peace with where they are — for now.
The longer people stay without career progression, development, or higher compensation, the more volatile the eventual release becomes. The Big Stay may simply be borrowing turnover from the future.
The retention trap
The dirty secret of the Big Stay is that high retention might be masking a compensation crisis hiding in plain sight.
High retention rates look like a success story. And that’s precisely the problem.
When people leave, compensation gets tested. A backfill forces a conversation about matching skills to the current market, and a counteroffer tests your compensation philosophy.
Of course, you should review comp structures yearly, if not more often. But when nobody leaves, your compensation function may drift into autopilot.
Managers read retention as satisfaction, salary structures go unexamined, and organizations grow confident that their pay is competitive. Not because they've checked, but because nobody is forcing the question.
The data suggests that this is already happening. According to Payscale's 2025–2026 Salary Budget Survey, only 16% of U.S. organizations expect a higher salary increase budget in 2026 — down three percentage points from the prior year.
Meanwhile, 68% plan to keep budgets flat, with organizations citing reduced competition for labor as a primary driver. In other words, companies are pulling back on pay increases precisely because nobody is leaving to prove they should do otherwise.
When the labor market thaws (and it will) companies whose compensation program drifted quietly out of alignment with the market won’t get a gradual warning. They’ll get a wave: flight risk surfacing all at once, clamor from incumbents who spent years calculating exactly how undervalued they were.
The Big Stay isn’t buying organizations’ time. It’s running an open tab. And when the bill finally comes due, it will land on HR’s desk with a thud.
Don’t wait until it’s too late
According to our 2026 Compensation Best Practices Report, 52% of organizations measure retention rates to assess compensation ROI. But the “intelligence” that voluntary turnover used to provide doesn’t work as a metric of workforce health anymore — not in this labor market.
Companies need fresh market data to tell them what their incumbent roles are worth right now: not what they were worth when you last hired the position, and not what a salary survey said six months ago.
The Great Thaw may be coming sooner than expected: the March 2026 BLS jobs report saw 178,000 new positions creating, crushing economists' expectations. Payscale gives compensation teams continuous visibility into current market pricing, so you’re ready for whatever path the Beveridge Curve takes.
