HR professionals in India say ‘overqualified’ job applicants are a no-no, despite a new international study which found that employees tend to perform better when overqualification becomes a norm in the organisation. The reason according to researchers at the University of Notredame and Portland State University is ‘when individuals feel they are not the only big fish in the pond, they tend to perform better.’
As we reach the end of hiring season, and ask anybody in charge of the hiring force at a major company and they seem to disagree. Aditya Narayan Mishra, CEO of CIEL HR Services makes a simple case in point. “Humans need a challenge,” he says. “When a candidate is overqualified, the challenge is removed and the job becomes disinteresting.”
Often this disengagement at the workplace can be accelerated if the individual has a group of friends who are in more senior positions and drawing a higher income than he is. However, experts reveal that only 10-20% of job applicants are overqualified for the position in the first place. And often the reason for this is not that they have a qualification for a different skill set altogether.
Rituparna Chakraborty, president of the Indian Staffing Association, recalls, “I remember there was an ad in the newspaper for a peon required for the Uttar Pradesh government. And lakhs of engineers applied!” So perhaps the reason for this is that a large section of job applicants are overqualified by means of a college degree, but not necessarily in the proficiency required in the position they are applying for.
Other more obvious factors that come into play during the interview stage are age, the remuneration that is asked for and of course, why a candidate would apply for lower level job to begin with. Annie Catharene, an HR professional with a branch of ICICI in Chennai, says she always deliberates a little longer when she sees an application form that shows higher qualifications than the rest. “It always makes me wonder how long the person is going to stay, because if the candidate is overqualified, chances are he or she will look for better opportunities in a short span.”
Unemployment Rate
The Unemployment Rate for the persons aged 18-29 years and holding a degree in graduation and above is found to be maximum with 28% based on Usual Principal Status Approach at the All India level.
The Unemployment Rate for the persons aged 18-29 years with educational qualification ‘below primary’ and ‘primary’ is about 4% based on Usual Principal Status Approach at the All India level.
(Info from Fourth Employment-Unemployment Survey Report 2013-14)