#overqualification

There’s a common job-hunting adage: “Expect one month of search for every Rs:10,000/$10,000 of your annual salary”. While that may sound reasonable, what if months have gone by, and you are still unemployed? Is it your fault? Or is the system more complex than it appears?

From a psychological lens, prolonged job searches often stir feelings of self-doubt, rejection, and emotional exhaustion- not because you are failing, but because the system is imperfect.

Too much or Too Little Experience:

Sometimes you are told you are overqualified. This could be due to fears that you won’t stay long or that your expectations will exceed what the employer can offer. At the other end, underqualified candidates, especially fresh graduates or career switchers, may find it nearly impossible to land interviews. This contradiction can lead to confusion and helplessness. Candidates may start internalising rejection as a person’s inadequacy. Example: A marketing veteran applying for an entry-level content role might be turned down for being “too senior”, while a junior applicant is rejected for not having “enough experience”.

Enthusiasm: A Double-Edged Sword:

You are excited, eager, and available, but too much enthusiasm can come across as desperation. On the flip side, too little interest may signal disengagement. Example: A job-seeker who has been unemployed for months might appear overly eager in interviews, which may lead recruiters to misread their intentions. Conversely, burnt-out candidates may appear indifferent, reducing their chances even when they are qualified.

The Invisible Biases Behind Hiring:

Psychological biases in hiring- conscious or unconscious- impact decisions. These can include favoritism, physical appearance, religion, gender, or even cultural background. Many candidates are passed over not for their lack of skill, but for failing to “fit” a subjective mold. Example: An excellent candidate may lose out to a less-qualified internal referral simply due to familiarity or informal networks.

Structural Flaws in Recruitment:

Many hiring systems are inefficient. Especially in under-resourced sectors, HR roles are often undervalued, and screening is rushed or poorly structured. This creates a sense of powerlessness- a key contributor to job search burnout. Applicant tracking systems (ATS) relying on keyword matches further dehumanise the process.

When the Problem Isn’t You:

Sometimes, roles disappear due to funding cuts, leadership exists, or shifting business priorities. These are external factors- unrelated to your competence. Example: An NGO may post a job, only to retract it when a funding grant falls through.

Moving Forward: Redefining Success

Rejection hurts, but it’s often not a reflection of your worth. The world of work is full of unpredictable, biased, and flawed systems. Recognising this can help you separate your self-esteem from your job search outcome. Therapy can help you process these experiences, rebuild confidence, and develop emotional resilience. At ImPerfect Psychotherapy, we support professionals navigating uncertainty- be it career transitions, rejection trauma, or burnout.

Not getting a job could be life redirecting you, not rejecting you. The next opportunity may align better with your purpose. Until then, stay grounded, stay human.

“Remember, not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck”. –Dalia Lama

You have to admire Steve Sammartino’s optimism. His The Great Fragmentation is a welcome paeon to micro-, small- and medium sized businesses (MiSMEs), which are the proportional giants of our and the world’s economy. Sammartino, like the rest of us, can see the economic shift from mass produced industrialisation to personalisation which is being pushed along rapidly by the broad availability of mobile phones, technology platforms, 3D printing, and innovative logistics solutions.

Startups Meicai and Naturally Vietnam, for example, knock down food security concerns and ‘middleman’ costs for small-scale farmers and restaurants by summoning and organising locally available minivan and motorbike drivers as couriers. We can all celebrate examples like these, and think of a host of others that belong to our local community.

But Sammartino’s optimism is broader than examples, with him declaring that the future is writ in the fragmentation of industries, and that this fragmentation will provide some redress to economic inequality. I can’t match that optimism, and not simply because I—like Sammartino—have read Piketty’s Capital in the Twentieth-Century and its older and more famous namesake and see the historical evidence against the idea that the world wealth gap is closing.

My wariness stems from wondering whether we have summoned all of the capabilities that we need to help micro-, small and medium-sized businesses to perform at their best. I wonder this because I am not sure universities have pulled education enough into the picture of innovation, or at least thought about education as flexibly as might be the case in the innovation pipeline.

I applaud the work that universities around the world are doing to support early stage innovation translation. We have a pretty good handle on the length of time and the financial support that might be needed to take an idea to market. Supporting people’s early-stage ideas with funding, mentoring and access to much needed services such as market research therefore makes a great deal of sense. But early backing is not the only reason startups fail, and of course technology and biopharma startups only make up a tiny fraction of what is predominantly a ‘bricks and mortar’ sector. It hardly needs to be restated that agribusiness, retail and consumer services make up the lion’s share of small business activity around the world.

Why MiSMEs fail has been the subject of much discussion, with structural barriers such as regulation or insolvency law not keeping up with new business models, lack of engagement with local communities—including Aboriginal and Indigenous peoples—or the difficulties operators have in securing financing, assuring supply-chain reliability and security, and IP protection. Meta-analyses, however, are few and far between, and many focus on technology startups rather than other small business types.

What meta analyses we do have suggest that upskilling could be as much of a problem as regulation, access to financial resources or logistics. Indeed, an absence of skills in dealing with those issues could be a key cause of small business failure.

An interesting example of a meta-analysis from the March 2016 edition of the Journal of Small Business Management drives home the value of concepts like ‘entrepreneurial self- efficacy (ESE)’ as a good predictor of business failure and success. ESE is, in basic terms, belief in one’s capability to marshal all the resources and capabilities needed to get a job done. Both too little and too much belief without justification can cripple innovation, and the suggested remedy is the more widespread provision of entrepreneurial education.

That’s a difficult ask if you don’t think you need it, or you don’t have the confidence to ask for it.

The former may be the bigger issue if we see our economy and those of China and the US as ineluctably headed in the direction of the era of the ‘overqualified, under-utilised and poorly paid’. The overqualified, we assume, won’t see themselves as needing any help.

‘Overqualified’ is a question-begging term. It expects a causality between a professional degree and a profession, for example, at a time when those professions are being stripped down and reshaped by what some are calling an informatics revolution. It also fails to acknowledge the general applicability of skills and proficiencies beyond a one-job horizon. Law is just one example of a professional area on the front line of those changes.

But my bigger issue is that the criticism is focused on the content of the degrees completed, rather than on the seemingly fixed and ahistorical structure of qualifications themselves, and our need to think about a suite of educational approaches to support business success.

The idea of a bachelor degree is about 800 years old. That idea has changed over time, but it is at present a relatively stable global phenomenon expressed in a 3–5 year length and majors and minors. This idea is codified both formally and informally in qualifications frameworks, legislation, and in funding agreements.

Yet the idea of a bachelor degree might be unravelling at the edges. Outside of universities, spinoffs such as Udacity and edX have coined and even trademarked terms such as ‘nanodegree’ and ‘micromasters’. We should not be concerned about the rise of an exotic zoo of new micro qualifications types and hack school pedagogies, including badges. We should be more firmly part of it, as firmly as mentoring in innovation programs. An export industry worth as much as ours should be ahead of the curve, not following long after it. It seems strange to me that our research can fuel deep machine learning, new models of logistics and new product materials and yet the containers we use to support the passing on of those innovations are thought of in such fixed terms.

I am not suggesting that people walking away from unfinished bachelor degrees is a good thing, or that bachelor degrees have zero worth. But I do wonder whether our diploma to doctorate array provides the personalised, lifelong support that our MiSME innovators need. Bachelor degrees might be too ‘once in a liftetime’, badges too small and MOOCs too lacking in recognition at present; our economy might need something in between and it might need different credential types at different times.

It might be that our off the shelf approach to qualifications needs to take a precision, personalised turn—as business is doing—and that our next generation of accelerators should include credential accelerators that produce qualifications innovations that are just as breathtaking, creative and useful as artificial intelligence and personalised immunology.

       All the generic stuff aside, these are few of the interesting stuff that may happen during placements:

Stress Interviews

        Ah, one of the most interesting, if not thrilling, aspects of the recruitment process. Generally, and I don’t know why, stress interviews are reserved for those candidates who were exceptionally good in the preceding rounds. Both technical and HR interviews can be stress interviews.          The objective of any stress interview is simple: to throw the candidate off his comfort zone and see how he reacts. Practically, the interviewer will try his very best to discredit the candidate in some way. He can focus on the candidate’s below-par grades, bad projects, lack of organizational activities or lack of extracurricular activities, etc. If the candidate gives a satisfactory response, he will immediately move on to the next sore point. If you watch the News Hour in Times Now, you will have a fair idea about stress interviews. 

General guidelines when attending a stress interview:

Obviously, the company isn’t going to tell you beforehand that you are going to face a stress interview. You have to first recognize the possibility of it happening, before facing any interview.

Don’t take the interviewer’s comments personally and harbour hatred towards him. Remember, he is just doing his job. There may come a time in the future when you will have to conduct stress interviews too.

Even if the interviewer talks in a very rude or uncouth fashion, never forget that he is the interviewer and you are the interviewee. Give him the respect he deserves, no matter what.

Interrupting the interviewer doesn’t help one bit. Whatever bad stuff he wants to say about you, just hear him out.

Most importantly, stick to your guns. Never retract the claims you made previously. This is in fact the single biggest reason candidates get knocked out in stress interviews - They are caught lying, or, they themselves become less confident of their work

Skipping Companies:

         This is a very controversial topic when it comes to on-campus placements. A lot of people are of the opinion that it would be best to attend whatever company comes next. If you get placed, you can always try better companies off-campus. The good thing about this approach is that it gets rid of the fear factor of unemployment and gives you ‘peace of mind’. The bad thing is that you get to miss out on a lot of good companies that come later. Getting placed offcampus isn’t as straightforward as oncampus. Sometimes, you need a referral and the interview process lags on for weeks.           So my suggestion is that its definitely alright to skip companies you don’t like, in the first few months of placements. Its also an irrefutable fact that your chances of getting placed in a company increases with time. Just don’t leave it too late.

Over-qualification:

          Yes, people. Over-qualification is a real thing that may actually happen to you. It is a phenomenon that often confounds the candidates who are rejected because of it for the first few times. But it’s based on simple logic. Any company would want employees who would work for it for a long time. If an employee feels that he is ‘too good’ for the post/salary that the company is offering him, there is a high probability that he will leave the company. This is why most companies are very cautious about hiring candidates who are ‘too good’. If you are a candidate, you shouldn’t worry too much about it.            I have, however, known some candidates who are so desperate to get placed that they ‘dumb’ themselves down when attending for such companies. Maybe hide their knowledge in the interview, trim the resume, etc. I would personally never recommend any of those activities. If the company thinks you are too good for it, then you really are too good for it. Find a better one, mate.