St.Louis Business Journal
BEING "OVERQUALIFIED" CAN BE BIG CHALLENGE IN JOB HUNTING

By Anna Navarro

April 2009  

Examples in this column are fictionalized to protect privacy and told with permission.



It’s hard enough to lose a job and reconcile yourself to the fact that your next position may not replicate the status and income of your last one. But when you don’t get hired for a lower level job because you’re “overqualified”, that’s a true double whammy.

Dealing with the issue starts by understanding where employers are coming from. Hiring is time consuming and expensive. Employers are unlikely to hire you if they fear you’ll take their lesser job, continue to look for a better one, then leave them in the lurch when you find a better one. Your challenge is to persuade them that won’t happen.

Ned was a senior partner in a major law firm. He had been head of the mergers and acquisitions division and a few years ago had been a member of the firm’s management committee. For a while, he’d had so much business he could hardly cope with it. But demand had shrunk steadily, and with the crash of the financial markets, had dried up almost completely.

Though he was a specialist, he certainly had the skills to do other kinds of legal work. But his peers in the firm were also short on work. And they wanted to keep their clients’ bills lean in these difficult financial times. So when they had extra work, they assigned it to associates rather than to under-occupied partners who had much higher billing rates.

The firm continued to pay Ned’s regular salary for a while. But they’d let him know that would stop in a few months. He’d started job hunting, but when he got feedback that employers thought he was overqualified for some of the positions he sought, he was totally stymied and sought my help.

I advised Ned to do three things. First, tone down how he presented himself. Second, find a way to talk about what was genuinely positive for him about the change. And third, indicate he knew the change would involve a decrease in compensation and he was comfortable with that. All three were a departure from what he had been doing.

Ned had been emphasizing that he was head of the mergers and acquisitions division for his firm and had been on the management committee. These are major accomplishments and he had a right to be proud of them, but they probably were scaring off employers who had lower level jobs to fill.

So he changed the way he presented himself. He dropped those accomplishments and instead focussed on the specific legal skills he could bring to the table. He described the work he’d done (without breaching confidentiality) that was similar to the tasks he suspected the particular employer needed done. That often involved reaching back into experiences he’d had many years earlier.

To help him figure out what was positive for him about the change, I asked if there was anything he’d disliked about his work. He said he actually didn't enjoy working on the management committee. And he didn’t like the pressure he was under when he was working on several mega projects simultaneously, which happened consistently in the heyday of mergers and acquisitions.

We translated that into saying something like this: "I was on the firm's management committee for a few years. While many regard that as a very prestigious role, I was frankly glad when it ended. I much prefer doing the day-to-day work of the law to dealing with issues - like compensation and who makes partner - that management committees deal with.”

He also mentioned early in his interviews that he realized he’d been working in an exceptionally well paid environment and that he understood the norm for the jobs he was applying for was much lower. He also added that didn’t present a major problem for him or his family. They had always lived below their means, and his wife had a professional job, so lower compensation wouldn’t require a change in their standard of living. (Note: this didn’t keep him from negotiating later for the top end of the compensation range for that kind of position.)

Keep in mind that if you are facing the possibility you will be seen as overqualified, many employers will actually be salivating to have someone on board with your skills and experience. But before they’ll give themselves permission to hire you, you’ll have to persuade them you won’t abandon them for a better job.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that works with clients on an individual basis to help them find more satisfaction and fulfillment in their work-lives. She can be reached by phone at (314) 367-0008 and her e-mail address is email@worktransitions.com. For more information visit the worktransitions.com website.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.