When you think about it...it's ridiculous to think that you wouldn't get hired because you have too much experience! But it happens all the time. You can fight against this by understanding what a company's biggest fears are about hiring a person that is overqualified and using this knowledge to market yourself the right way on your resume and in the interview.
The key is to first know if you are subject to being labeled as "overqualified". Here's how you will know:
- You have a total years of experience that far exceeds the requirement years for the job. A few years more than what they need is fine. However, 10 more years experience then is needed will raise a red flag.
- You have a current job title that ranks higher than the open job's title and may even match or outrank the Hiring Manager themselves. Your title is intimidating.
- You have only a small focus on the required responsibilities for the job with the majority of your current job focused on more elevated / managerial duties. You're not hands-on enough.
- You make 10-20K more than the salary cap of the job. Manager will be afraid they can't get you or that if they do, you will always be looking for another job that will pay more.
- Concern of Challenge: they are afraid that since you have already been exposed to more advanced projects or managerial work that you will become bored quickly with such a hands-on role or project that is perceived to be less difficult/ challenging.
- Concern of Focus: they are afraid that, even if you take your management hat off, you will try to resume a leadership role anyway you can and assert yourself inappropriately to try and run things.
- Concern of Retention: they are afraid that taking this step back represents a concession for you and short term career move that will ultimately address by leaving at some point in the future to pursue your prior position's stature, focus and income.
- Clarify your intentions. Consider placing a statement within your resume objective that addresses your receptiveness to other titles, levels and types of roles. As well, make sure to verbalize this again during the interview.
- Edit the job title you use with parenthesis to control the translation...ex: "Director of Engineering (hands-on developer). Or you can take your title off completely and use a descriptive placeholder....ex: instead of putting "Director of Engineering", you could put "Member of Leadership Team for Software Engineering".
- Specify your role. If you are a Manager or Director, but wish to be considered for a more hands-on position, simply flip the order of your functional bullet points to place the more active responsibilities you had first and the more managerial responsibilities at the bottom. Visually, this will communicate an entirely different picture of what you do/ want to to do. Or you could use the first bullet to clarify how hands-on you are.
- Account for how you spend your time. If you are concerned that the breakdown of your role might get misread and end up labeling you as a hands-off person, consider placing a % mark next to each primary responsibility so that they can see exactly how you spent your time.
- Explain your rationale. Many times there is an excellent reason for wanting to accept a lower title/ lower income role. Some good ones are: you miss being more hands-on or this title and role is actually the same level as what you are doing now or you see some other benefit in what you will learn in this role or in this company that makes this a palatable trade off or it's a shorter commute, etc... Be prepared to explain this during the interview. If you don't, they will draw their own (and probably incorrect) conclusions.