Fair enough - but then tell the candidate that: "Sorry, you're overqualified, you can find a better position, and be happier. We just need a code monkey for now". None of the BS about "free spirits" and "normal jobs" - I mean, come on.
I disagree. There's always jobs for valuable candidates. It's average to below-average candidates who find any market challenging. I believe in always having standards, and if you run across this kind of bullshit, set them straight and move on. The reason this kind of crap persists is because too many people put up with it.
Could also be easily a case of being overly qualified of them not even taking the application seriously because if some one sent a CV that looks like his to any entry level tech support / sales support position they would most likely assume it's a gag.
Overall hiring overqualified people is a problem, they might never be happy and they can easily undermine the structure of a company even unintentionally.
This is like hiring some one like Wozniak to do entry level programming at a company hell undermine everyone from the team leader upto the CTO just for being who he is.
Before i incur the wrath of the "pick yourself up by your own bootstraps" crowd, my goal was not to say "poor me", even though that might have been how it came out. I'm not trying to get advice, or someone to offer me a job. All i was trying to say was that there are more people like me out there, loads of people that are still pretty darn intelligent but look horrible on paper.
Personally i'm sick of the whole process and all of the fakeness involved in trying to land a job. If you're unconventional, you better be good at faking looking conventional so you can get a job, otherwise you're out of luck. Not for me.
If a business is having trouble finding qualified candidates for a position, maybe they should spend a little more time considering that it might not be that there's a lack of people that can do a good job in that position, but that their conception of what makes a "qualified candidate" is overly restrictive and broken.
I agree with the point. Fully. I think this would be a good thing to try and clear up during hiring if the candidate is inexperienced or seems to have trouble with commitment.
However when reading the above the tone seemed ridiculously over the top, which is why I tuned in.
True, seems like a great way to disrespect candidates (good or bad). Then you can complain about not being able to find people cause the job has been up for so long.
> The "traditional understanding" of getting an applicant to your job that is over qualified is that they are just trying to get a paycheck while they look for something better.
With the current lack of bonds between employer and employee, you must consider that all your employees are in this condition.
Hiring is a hard problem, and I don't think these are good solutions to optimizing the front of the funnel.
If I was applying to a position and was given this, it would immediately signal that the company doesn't respect my time. It's clear that they want me to put in work without any investment on their part, and a coding exercise with no previous interaction does the same.
I may be biased as an engineer at a large, well-paying tech company with a few years of experience. If I was desperate for a job, for instance applying for a first job, I may be more willing to put up with the power and respect imbalance.
> how they speak, how they look like
What if a candidate isn't able to speak? I'd also hope that no decisions are being made based on how the candidate looks.
I think one of the points of this posting is that if you take it too serious you already are not fit for the job. Thus, it's helping to weed out candidates that may not fit well with the company.
We can't expect everyone utterance to be rational and logical. We're all just human at the end of the day. We should expect job candidates to try their best to get the job.
"Overqualified" has got to be the softest insult you can throw at a job seeker. It ostensibly says "we aren't secure in ourselves as employers to challenge our workers to produce great work, nor do we value original thought, so we'd rather hire drones that don't rattle the cage".
As someone that's hired a lot of people being overqualified is an actual reason not to want to hire an applicant. The reason is because they are not likely to last in the position. Not every company is some high growth engineering phenomenon. Sometimes you need someone to fill a specific role and you'd like them to be stable in that role.
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