We’ve heard from a lot of people who feel they’re getting rejected from jobs for being overqualified, which can be pretty frustrating. One thing that can help with this is to think about overqualification as an issue with poor fit for a particular role. Essentially, what feels like a general penalty for past success is usually about more specific concerns that your hiring manager might have, like:
Will you actually be good at this work? You might have years of experience in senior roles, or other impressive credentials, but this doesn’t always mean you’ll be able to perform well in a more junior role. For instance, if you’ve been managing teams for years, they may worry you lack recent hands-on experience and don’t know current best practices.
Will you stick around? If you’ve been leading large teams but are applying for an individual contributor role, they might wonder if you’ll actually find the work engaging or get bored without the higher-stakes responsibilities. They may worry you’re just using this as a stepping stone until something better comes along. Hiring is costly and time-consuming, so they don’t want to invest in someone who’ll be gone in a few months.
Will you expect more than they can offer? If you’ve worked in more senior roles, an organization might think you’ll be looking for opportunities for growth, benefits, and a salary beyond what the organization is able to offer. If you’re likely to demand more than they’re able to give, they won’t want to waste time advancing you through the process.
If you’re genuinely excited about a role, but are worried about being perceived as overqualified, the good news is that you can address these concerns in your application (especially your cover letter or application answers). For instance, if you’re stepping down in seniority, explain why you actually want to do this work. If you’ve worked in management and are wanting a return to the hands-on work you’re really passionate about, then mention this.
You should also make sure to emphasize the parts of your background that are most relevant to the role, rather than the ones that seem most impressive in general. Your PhD might be impressive, for example, but unless it’s closely connected to the role you’re applying for, you might want to highlight other parts of your CV instead (like your operational experience if you’re applying for an ops role).
The important takeaway is to think about your fit for a specific role rather than your qualification level. Having more experience in a certain area isn’t necessarily better if it doesn’t help with the type of work you’d actually be doing, or if it implies you’ll have expectations that an organization won’t be able to match.
Heads up for job-board users: you can now find more roles (1,200+) and set custom email alerts on our job board.
For added context: As promised earlier, we’re continuing to scale and improve our job board, to help talented people find impactful roles (including in causes, regions, and orgs that might have been underrepresented in EA so far). Mainly, you can now find more roles than before and set alerts for your chosen filters, in addition to smaller improvements, like being able to filter for highlighted roles. We’ll continue doing significant work on the board in the coming months, including by adding more roles, and improving existing features while adding new ones.
Here’s how you can help us help you:
If you land a role that you found on the job board, please let us know! Even a short message about how our services helped you makes a huge difference to our ability to continue providing these services.
If you know of any orgs you think we should monitor for the board (including ones you work for), please share them!
If you work at an org that’s listed on the board and have a question on your application forms regarding where candidates heard about the role, please consider adding “Probably Good” as an option (or consider asking your recruiting team to do it). We’re also happy to collaborate on adding a UTM parameter to links or doing something similar; let us know if you’re interested.
If you’re a hiring manager/recruiter who ends up hiring a candidate who found your role through our job board, please let us know!
Other than that, please also share the job board with people you think could benefit from it, and get in touch with us if you have any feedback or other suggestions. Thank you!
Lots of “entry-level” jobs require applicants to have significant prior experience. This seems like a catch-22: if entry-level positions require experience, how are you supposed to get the experience in the first place? Needless to say, this can be frustrating. But we don’t think this is (quite) as paradoxical as it sounds, for two main reasons.
1: Listed requirements usually aren’t as rigid as they seem.
Employers usually expect that candidates won’t meet all of the “essential” criteria. These are often more of a wish list than an exhaustive list of strict requirements. Because of this, you shouldn’t necessarily count yourself out because you fall a little short on the listed experience requirements. Orgs within EA are much better at communicating this explicitly, but it should be taken as a rule of thumb outside of EA as well. You should still think strategically about which roles you apply for, but this is something to factor in.
2: You can develop experience outside of conventional jobs.
For a hiring manager, length of experience is a useful heuristic. It tells them you’ve probably picked up the skills needed for the role. But if you can show that you have these skills through other means, the exact amount of experience you have becomes far less important. A few of the best ways to do this:
Internships and fellowships. These are designed for people entering new fields and signal to employers that someone has already vetted you. They’re often competitive, but usually don’t require previous experience.
Volunteering. Organizations usually have lower bars for volunteers than paid positions, making this a more accessible option (usually). Look for advertised volunteering opportunities at orgs you’re interested in, or reach out to them directly.
Independent projects. Use your spare time to make something tangible you can show potential employers, like an app, portfolio, research paper, blog, or running an event. Obviously the most useful projects will vary by profession, but whatever you do, try and make it look professional–close to something you’d do in a “real” role.
Courses and qualifications. Taking some online courses can fill gaps in your knowledge and demonstrate some investment in the career path, especially if there are well-regarded professional certifications in your field (though perhaps less relevant for EA roles). Employers also often interpret graduate degrees as relevant experience, and if you’ve done any relevant coursework in your undergraduate degree, you can bring this up too.
Also: don’t neglect networking. If somebody at a hiring org knows you personally, they can be more willing to look past ways in which your CV might diverge from their listed requirements.
If you want to learn more about specific strategies and see a practical example of how to interpret job requirements, you can read our full guide on building experience through non-traditional jobs.
Anecdotally, it seems like many employers have become more selective about qualifications, particularly in tech where the market got really competitive in 2024 - junior engineers were suddenly competing with laid-off senior engineers and FAANG bros.
Also, per their FAQ, Capital One has a policy not to select candidates who don’t meet the basic qualifications for a role. One Reddit thread says this is also true for government contractors. Obviously this may vary among employers—is there any empirical evidence on how often candidates get hired without meeting 100% of qualifications, especially since 2024?
We’ve heard from a lot of people who feel they’re getting rejected from jobs for being overqualified, which can be pretty frustrating. One thing that can help with this is to think about overqualification as an issue with poor fit for a particular role. Essentially, what feels like a general penalty for past success is usually about more specific concerns that your hiring manager might have, like:
Will you actually be good at this work? You might have years of experience in senior roles, or other impressive credentials, but this doesn’t always mean you’ll be able to perform well in a more junior role. For instance, if you’ve been managing teams for years, they may worry you lack recent hands-on experience and don’t know current best practices.
Will you stick around? If you’ve been leading large teams but are applying for an individual contributor role, they might wonder if you’ll actually find the work engaging or get bored without the higher-stakes responsibilities. They may worry you’re just using this as a stepping stone until something better comes along. Hiring is costly and time-consuming, so they don’t want to invest in someone who’ll be gone in a few months.
Will you expect more than they can offer? If you’ve worked in more senior roles, an organization might think you’ll be looking for opportunities for growth, benefits, and a salary beyond what the organization is able to offer. If you’re likely to demand more than they’re able to give, they won’t want to waste time advancing you through the process.
If you’re genuinely excited about a role, but are worried about being perceived as overqualified, the good news is that you can address these concerns in your application (especially your cover letter or application answers). For instance, if you’re stepping down in seniority, explain why you actually want to do this work. If you’ve worked in management and are wanting a return to the hands-on work you’re really passionate about, then mention this.
You should also make sure to emphasize the parts of your background that are most relevant to the role, rather than the ones that seem most impressive in general. Your PhD might be impressive, for example, but unless it’s closely connected to the role you’re applying for, you might want to highlight other parts of your CV instead (like your operational experience if you’re applying for an ops role).
The important takeaway is to think about your fit for a specific role rather than your qualification level. Having more experience in a certain area isn’t necessarily better if it doesn’t help with the type of work you’d actually be doing, or if it implies you’ll have expectations that an organization won’t be able to match.
If you want to learn more about this, you can read our full article on overqualification.
Heads up for job-board users: you can now find more roles (1,200+) and set custom email alerts on our job board.
For added context: As promised earlier, we’re continuing to scale and improve our job board, to help talented people find impactful roles (including in causes, regions, and orgs that might have been underrepresented in EA so far). Mainly, you can now find more roles than before and set alerts for your chosen filters, in addition to smaller improvements, like being able to filter for highlighted roles. We’ll continue doing significant work on the board in the coming months, including by adding more roles, and improving existing features while adding new ones.
Here’s how you can help us help you:
If you land a role that you found on the job board, please let us know! Even a short message about how our services helped you makes a huge difference to our ability to continue providing these services.
If you know of any orgs you think we should monitor for the board (including ones you work for), please share them!
If you work at an org that’s listed on the board and have a question on your application forms regarding where candidates heard about the role, please consider adding “Probably Good” as an option (or consider asking your recruiting team to do it). We’re also happy to collaborate on adding a UTM parameter to links or doing something similar; let us know if you’re interested.
If you’re a hiring manager/recruiter who ends up hiring a candidate who found your role through our job board, please let us know!
Other than that, please also share the job board with people you think could benefit from it, and get in touch with us if you have any feedback or other suggestions. Thank you!
I was on it yesterday and thought “huh! 1200+ jobs is a lot!” Well done scaling this up!
Amazing work! I really appreciate everything you’re doing to get more people into jobs that meaningfully improve the world.
Lots of “entry-level” jobs require applicants to have significant prior experience. This seems like a catch-22: if entry-level positions require experience, how are you supposed to get the experience in the first place? Needless to say, this can be frustrating. But we don’t think this is (quite) as paradoxical as it sounds, for two main reasons.
1: Listed requirements usually aren’t as rigid as they seem.
Employers usually expect that candidates won’t meet all of the “essential” criteria. These are often more of a wish list than an exhaustive list of strict requirements. Because of this, you shouldn’t necessarily count yourself out because you fall a little short on the listed experience requirements. Orgs within EA are much better at communicating this explicitly, but it should be taken as a rule of thumb outside of EA as well. You should still think strategically about which roles you apply for, but this is something to factor in.
2: You can develop experience outside of conventional jobs.
For a hiring manager, length of experience is a useful heuristic. It tells them you’ve probably picked up the skills needed for the role. But if you can show that you have these skills through other means, the exact amount of experience you have becomes far less important. A few of the best ways to do this:
Internships and fellowships. These are designed for people entering new fields and signal to employers that someone has already vetted you. They’re often competitive, but usually don’t require previous experience.
Volunteering. Organizations usually have lower bars for volunteers than paid positions, making this a more accessible option (usually). Look for advertised volunteering opportunities at orgs you’re interested in, or reach out to them directly.
Independent projects. Use your spare time to make something tangible you can show potential employers, like an app, portfolio, research paper, blog, or running an event. Obviously the most useful projects will vary by profession, but whatever you do, try and make it look professional–close to something you’d do in a “real” role.
Courses and qualifications. Taking some online courses can fill gaps in your knowledge and demonstrate some investment in the career path, especially if there are well-regarded professional certifications in your field (though perhaps less relevant for EA roles). Employers also often interpret graduate degrees as relevant experience, and if you’ve done any relevant coursework in your undergraduate degree, you can bring this up too.
Also: don’t neglect networking. If somebody at a hiring org knows you personally, they can be more willing to look past ways in which your CV might diverge from their listed requirements.
If you want to learn more about specific strategies and see a practical example of how to interpret job requirements, you can read our full guide on building experience through non-traditional jobs.
Anecdotally, it seems like many employers have become more selective about qualifications, particularly in tech where the market got really competitive in 2024 - junior engineers were suddenly competing with laid-off senior engineers and FAANG bros.
Also, per their FAQ, Capital One has a policy not to select candidates who don’t meet the basic qualifications for a role. One Reddit thread says this is also true for government contractors. Obviously this may vary among employers—is there any empirical evidence on how often candidates get hired without meeting 100% of qualifications, especially since 2024?