Why Being Overqualified Gets Candidates Vetoed

Being too good for the job is a real reason candidates get rejected, and only part of the reasoning behind it holds up. Candidates hear "you're overqualified" as a polite excuse, because surely more ability is better. On the employer's side it does real work. In four experiments published in 2020, Roman Galperin and colleagues found that hiring managers saw highly capable candidates as less committed to the organization and penalized them for it.

What is the employer afraid of?

Three things. The person will leave soon. The role is too small to hold them. The team's existing structure will be disturbed.

This isn't one company's quirk. A 2011 review in Industrial and Organizational Psychology by Berrin Erdogan, Talya Bauer and colleagues opens by noting that one of the "truisms" of personnel selection is that overqualified applicants are likely to be a poor fit. In Japan the word used in hiring meetings is "over-spec" (オーバースペック).

Some of these fears have research behind them. Some are closer to imagination. They need to be taken one at a time.

Will an overqualified hire leave quickly?

Sometimes. People who feel overqualified do leave more often, and how much more depends heavily on whether the job gives them any say.

Start with what managers infer. The paper by Galperin, Oliver Hahl, Adina Sterling and Jerry Guo, in Administrative Science Quarterly, separates two beliefs. Highly capable candidates care less about the organization's mission and values. And they have more outside options, so they are a flight risk. Both are inferences a manager draws from a resume. The candidate hasn't said anything yet.

Now what happens after hiring. In 2009, Erdogan and Bauer published a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology of 244 sales associates in 25 stores of a Turkish retail chain. Those who felt overqualified were less satisfied, less inclined to stay, and more likely to quit. So far the managers are right.

The same study had two more results. Among associates who felt empowered, meaning they felt they had autonomy and impact in their work, all of those negative effects were weaker. And the associates who felt overqualified had higher objective sales, empowered or otherwise.

This is sales staff at one retail chain, so I'd be careful stretching it. It does show that leaving isn't a fixed property of the person. The same individual ends up in two different places depending on whether they were given room to decide. That's the pattern I described in Motivation is a design decision.

Is the role really too small for them?

It can be. But the risk follows the person's feeling of being overqualified. It doesn't follow the resume.

A 2017 meta-analysis by Michael Harari and colleagues in the Journal of Vocational Behavior pulled together 25 years of research. Employees who feel overqualified are less satisfied, less committed to the organization, under more psychological strain, and more prone to deviant behavior such as coming in late. The people most likely to feel that way were younger, more educated and more narcissistic. The feeling becomes less common with age.

My fit check has a veto called Drive: the role can't give this person the two things they want most. The method page says nothing specific about candidates who exceed the role, so what follows is how I handle it myself.

Take a hypothetical. Someone who has run a department of thirty applies for a role with no reports. If what they still want most is influence over people and direction, the role can't supply it, and what I see is a person and a role that don't line up. If what they want is to get back to doing the work with their own hands, the role supplies exactly that, and "overqualified" stops being a reason. The two resumes look identical.

So this one can't be settled from paper. It takes asking why they really left the last job, and what they have paid a price for in the past.

Does a strong hire break the team?

Of the fears, this one has the least to do with the candidate. The research points at how secure the boss feels, and at whether the new hire would be the only big fish in the pond.

In a 2020 study in Human Resource Management, Erdogan and colleagues followed 124 employees and 54 managers at a large holding company in Ankara, Turkey, over five rounds of data collection. The less secure managers felt about their own jobs, the lower the career satisfaction of their overqualified employees, and the more of those employees quit.

A 2015 study by Jia Hu and colleagues in the Journal of Applied Psychology covered 351 people in 72 groups. When a person's peers were also overqualified on average, the overqualified employee saw the work as more significant, felt a better fit with the group, and performed better both in the role and beyond it.

Put together, "he'll disrupt the team" is frequently a statement about the person saying it. When the hiring manager says in the meeting that a candidate is too strong to manage, I'd record that first as information about the manager's side.

It can also be a real problem. Another veto in the method is Friction: this person in this environment will become constant friction. That needs facts, though. How they behaved under a boss with the opposite style would be one.

I take "overqualified" through four steps, and only a verified Drive or Friction veto rejects the candidate

The author's own order for handling a candidate who exceeds the role. The method page has no rule written for this case; research in parentheses

1. 1Take the price out firstPay expectations above the budget are a question of whether the deal can close. They go on a separate line and stay out of the fit score.
2. 2DriveCan the role give the two things they want most? If verified that it can't, the person and the role don't line up, and it stops there. (Feeling overqualified goes with lower satisfaction and more quitting; weaker when empowered.)
3. 3FrictionWould this person with this boss or team become constant friction? If verified, not for this role, and they can be referred to another. (More quitting when the manager feels insecure.)
4. 4Only a suspicionNo veto. It becomes the first thing to get evidence on in the interview.

I take no points off for exceeding the requirements. Only a verified veto can take points away.

Exceeding the role costs nothing in my book

The method page has no rule for a candidate who exceeds the role. My own handling is to take nothing off. The verdict is set by the weakest of the four layers, and a high equipment score can't pull it down.

As I see it, the only routes from "overqualified" to a rejection are the two vetoes above, and each has to be verified. A suspicion doesn't count. The method page is strict on this: it becomes the first thing to get evidence on in the interview.

Money tends to get mixed in here. "She was on 15 million yen and our band tops out at 10," to make up an example. That is a question of whether the deal can close. It says nothing about whether the person fits the role. Argue the two together and someone who was a Fit goes into the record as a no, and nobody thinks of them when a role at the right level opens later.

If a hiring meeting is going to turn someone down for being overqualified, my view is that the record should say which veto it was, who verified it, and which event is the evidence. If nobody can write that down, it isn't a veto yet. What the meeting talks about once yes-or-no is replaced with five levels is in Fit or No Fit Is the Wrong Question in a Hiring Meeting.

When someone is hired with the question still open, the usual practice is to hand it to the hiring manager to revisit a few times in the first months. The check is concrete. Is the person getting the two things the role promised, and did they want those things after all? Erdogan and Bauer's 244 sales associates are worth keeping in mind. Where people felt they had a say, the dissatisfaction and the quitting eased, and the sales were higher all along. Where the role withholds that, the employer's original fears come true one by one, and the cause sits with the role.

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