Much too stellar a career?

It takes skill for a candidate who’s seen as overqualified to overcome the label.

Few obstacles are more perplexing for jobseekers than being told you’re overqualified

A 39-year-old executive with a successful record as a senior vice-president has been job hunting since she was laid off a few months ago. She doesn’t care about matching her former title. She just wants a challenging job where she can learn and grow.

But she was shocked recently when a recruiter told her she was too senior for an opening that matched her skills and experience almost perfectly.

“It’s hard when your big title or years of experience are seen as a disqualifier rather than a qualifier,” says the executive, who asks that her name not be used. “It would be so easy to go down a rabbit­ hole wondering: ‘What am I doing wrong?’ ”

Few obstacles are more perplexing for jobseekers than being told you’re over-qualified. The problem can crop up any time, even early in applicants’ careers, and often when they least expect it. Trying to overcome hirers’ misgiving­s can feel like shadow-boxing with a ghost.

New research lends insight into some of the quirky and often counterintuitive reasons managers decide somebody is just too good for the job — reasons applicants can sometimes overcome with forethought and skilful communi­cation.

Many people wrongly assume a power-packed resume is a ticket to a job, says Oliver Hahl, an assistan­t professor of organisation theory and strategy at Carnegie Mellon University. “Decis­ions are often much more nuanced than that,” he says.

Hahl and several colleagues tested hiring managers’ willingness to make an offer to two candidates for a corporate finance job. Both had elite-college degrees and worked at comparable employer­s. One candidate had a stellar record, heading a 10-person team financing $US1.5bn ($2.2bn) transactions. The other led a much smaller team doing deals one-tenth the size.

The managers were likelier to make an offer to the candid­ate with the less impressive record, according to a study publishe­d in March and co-led by Hahl, Roman Galperin, an assoc­iate professor of management at Johns Hopkins University, and Adina Sterling, an associate professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University.

The managers assumed the candidate with the stellar resume wouldn’t be as committed to the company or stick with the job as long as the other applicant, the researche­rs found. The hiring managers also assumed the star candidate wouldn’t be as motiv­ated to do well, the study showed. And bosses might feel threatened by him, fearing he wouldn’t listen to them or might even take their job, Hahl says.

Labelling a candidate as over-qualified is often a pretext for age discrimination. But younger workers also face this obstacle.

An Ivy League degree can confer­ major career advantages, and some firms prefer to hire grads only from schools they consider blue-chip. But other employers have a surprising bias against candidates from elite schools.

“Some managers want applic­ants who went to a second-tier MBA program, worked while they were in school, got straight As and were scrappy,” says executive coach Julie Kantor in New York. “For them, it’s about looking under the hood.”

Others fear that a jobseeker with a turbocharged resume won’t play well with others.

Bill Sandbrook once rejected a candid­ate with impeccable cred­entials because he behaved like a prima donna.

“You could just tell he thought: ‘You need to hire me because I’m me. Can’t you see?’ ” says Sandbrook, chairman and chief executive of US Concrete, a company with 3300 employees based in Euless, Texas.

Sandbrook is also cautious about loading up a team with too many A-plus players who might compete against each other rather­ than co-operate to benefit the company.

Some people have legitimate reasons for applying for jobs beneath­ their capabilities, such as gaining more time for family dut­ies or recovering from burnout.

Employers still worry that such applicants over-estimate their own willingness to live with the losses that come with reduced status, says Mark Phillips, chief executive of Sanford Rose Assoc­iates/HireEducation, a recruiting firm in Boulder, Colorado.

He’s sceptical of candidates who say they’re willing to take a 25 per cent pay cut, for example.

Such applicants must be able to tell a compelling story about their motivations, says Elaine Varelas, managing partner of Keystone Partners, a Boston leadership-­development firm.

One senior executive wearied of working at a company where employees were paid well above the industry average.

“She was tired of having to deal with employees who were complainin­g about whether their bonus was $200,000 or $210,000,” Varelas says.

Although the executive appear­ed over-qualified for the new position she sought, she landed the job by persuading the chief executive that her commitment was genuine, Varelas says.

Showing passion for a compan­y’s mission is persuasive, she says. This requires researching the company and the job so you can explain what excites you about both.

Lorraine Vargas Townsend held senior human resources leadership posts at several companies ranging from 5000 to 150,000 employees before deciding last year to take some time off with her wife and baby.

A recruiter soon approached her about an opening at a 600-employee company, saying: “I have this job, but it’s too small for you.”

Townsend was excited about the opening, however — a senior position at a Boston-based tech company. The company provides a platform for building the kind of apps Townsend wished she’d had on previous jobs, to automate basic human resources tasks, and she was eager to help identify needs its technology could meet. She soon signed on as chief people officer and loves the work.

“You have to have a compelling reason why the needs of this business and this job are right for you, and about what you can bring to the role,” she says.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL