Diana Alt [00:00:02]:
Hey there everybody. Diana Alt here, your host of work should feel good. And today we're going to tackle one of the biggest topics that I get questions about all the time from people who are embarking on a job search or in the middle of the job search. And that is how do I address this whole concern about being overqualified before I get started? If this is a question that you're interested in, um, and you like this episode, please consider leaving me a review for the podcast on whatever platform that you're on. I'm not going to tell you how many stars to leave. That's on you. The question that I get is common for me in part because of who I work with the most in my career strategy and job search coaching. I work mostly with mid career people in leadership roles, whether that is a high impact individual contributor, like a senior project manager, a technical architect, something like that, or it's someone that actually is in a people management role.

Diana Alt [00:01:03]:
Typically work all the way up through vp. Don't do as much C suite stuff. And the question of being overqualified at the C suite is different anyway. Things look way different when you're at the top of the food chain than when you're in this kind of senior IC middle management area. Anyhow, the question comes up two ways for the people that I work with. The first one is how do I combat a company thinking that I'm overqualified? This can show up at any stage of the game, from resume all the way through offer. And then the other one usually happens even before someone is making an offer, even at the very beginning when they're considering how to target their job search. And that is how do I justify applying to lower roles than I have previously held? So one of those is kind of an external perceptions thing.

Diana Alt [00:01:50]:
The other one can go both ways. So justifying to yourself that you're applying for a lower role. I'm not actually going to tackle that in this episode because what we're trying to do is make sure that people can present themselves in the best light, even when they have these very lofty qualifications. But they are choosing for whatever reason to apply for a lower role. So it's the external impression of why the heck are you applying for a lower role that you have to work on. I'll go on record saying I hate the term overqualified with a white hot fire of 10,000 burning suns from a coaching perspective and also from when I was in the corporate workforce and looking for jobs. But I also get it because when people are Trying to make a hire. They want someone that they can afford in their budget, someone that can solve the problems of the job and bring the results of the job that is on the job description.

Diana Alt [00:02:46]:
Not the one that you did three years ago. That's two layers up on the food chain. Not the one that you hope that you can work your way back to in three years. But the job opening that they have right now that you applied for and you're interviewing for, they want someone that can do that and also wants to do that. The more enthusiastic you are about doing that, the better. And then there's also this whole thing of they want to make sure that somebody is going to be good to work with. You know, there are sometimes people that take a job that is a couple layers, you know, kind of couple notches below where their potential lies, and they can end up being insufferable. And nobody wants that.

Diana Alt [00:03:26]:
So all that aside, I get it. I get the reasons why companies are concerned about being overqualified. But I think that there is at least part of this concern that job candidates can control. And one of the things that goes throughout all of my coaching, most of my content, whether it's explicit or implicit, is that professionals need to take charge of agency where they can and influence the things that they can influence, and then kind of let go of the things that they can't influence, they can't control. So when people are dealing with overqualified objections, concerns, et cetera, there are a couple things that they need to consider. And the top thing is whether you're overselling yourself for the job that you're applying for. That can happen in a few ways. The way I define overselling is that you're applying to a lower job with a resume that sounds like a higher job, or you're in the interview cycle.

Diana Alt [00:04:31]:
You're talking about how you want to do the things from the higher job and how your primarily primary track record of success is the things from the higher job. Now, I want you to understand that this whole thing does not mean that you have to ignore the fact that you've had successes that you've had. It's that you need to change. Emphasis. Most people that I work with have somewhere between, I'd say 15 to 20 is kind of the sweet spot. Some a little less, some a little more. But you have many, many years of experience. In a lot of cases, if you're.

Diana Alt [00:05:05]:
If you're trying to address this overqualified thing, you have many years of experience and you're going to be in interviews for 30 minutes with some people, maybe 45 minutes with someone else, maybe a 90 minute presentation or panel interview, things like that. There's a lot that you can pick and choose from whenever you are doing presentations and talking to people and all of that stuff throughout the actual hiring cycle. And when you're trying to put all that information from that long career that you've had onto two pieces of paper, which is my sweet spot ideal for this set of clients. For the resume, you've got plenty of room to reposition and you've got plenty of room to de. Emphasize the things that are less important and emphasize the things that are more important. So there's three categories of things that you want to dial in whenever you are applying for a role that might make someone have questions might you might technically by your past experience be overqualified for the first one is that you want to dial in the problem scope of the roles that you are moving into. And here's what I mean by that. A lot of times I'll work with somebody that'll be say, like a director of engineering or an engineering manager.

Diana Alt [00:06:25]:
Software engineering I'm speaking of. For those, those of you wondering if I'm talking about like nuclear engineers, it's software engineering I'm mostly speaking of because I work with people in that realm. But many tech organizations have flattened and so there's less management roles, more high impact individual contributor roles like senior or principal software engineering roles. So when you are thinking about that, you want to make sure that you're considering what are the problems that an engineering manager would need to solve versus what are the problems that a senior or principal engineer would need to solve? A lot. This is. There's a little bit of art to this because in a lot of cases this stuff is not explicitly listed on a job description. Job descriptions kind of suck in many ways because they focus on the number of years of experience and the certifications and the tasks that you have done or you're going to be doing in order to be qualified and successful in the role. But they don't necessarily extrapolate that to what am I trying to solve.

Diana Alt [00:07:23]:
In the case of an engineering manager, there might be a lot of language about leading a group of 15 engineers and two business analysts, about hiring, firing, performance management, career development, about setting the overall direction for how the department is going to run things like that, and that the fact that you've had that experience isn't irrelevant if you're applying for a senior or a principal engineering job, but you need to frame it differently. When you look at job descriptions for most roles like senior or principal software engineer, there is a bit of a strategy component in there and there's also usually some sort of mentoring junior engineers in technology, best practices, new technologies, et cetera. One of the things that you can do to reframe the problem scope is to step away from language like I managed hiring, firing, performance management policy direction for a department of 15 software engineers and instead talk about your work in mentoring and developing the talent and skills of a team of software engineers. So that is 100% true on both sides of the equation. But that I mentored engineers in these things is much more in line with the problems to be solved by the senior engineer. Another thing that I want you to consider doing is dialing in the vocabulary that you use. And again, this goes through all phases. It goes through resume all the way through to your interviews at every level.

Diana Alt [00:09:05]:
One of the things that happens with vocabulary is, is that sometimes we're using job titles that don't look natural on a career path, on a resume or on your LinkedIn. Something that people really have a lot of concern about is changing how they present those job titles on their resume or on their LinkedIn because they're concerned about lying. So here's what I would. Here's how I have addressed this with a confusing job title in the past, how I've worked with other clients. When you think about the work that you've done in a role, especially the work that you are positioning for on a Resume or on LinkedIn, think about what the market facing job title should be. I did this in a situation personally where I wasn't necessarily overqualified for a role, but I had a confusing job title. I worked at a healthcare IT company and my job title was Solution Designer, which meant absolutely nothing to anybody at that time. It was actually a business analyst role, basically a senior business analyst role.

Diana Alt [00:10:08]:
And I mean to tell you that the minute that I changed that on my resume, my hit rate for being called for interviews dramatically increased. Dramatically. So making changes like that is fine on your resume. And if you're concerned about, well, is that the truth? How's that going to show up on a background check, reference check, those kinds of things? Then when you actually fill out official applications for a company, you have the opportunity to fill out the official information. Now most systems slurp out information from your resume as the starting point for the information on the application, but those two things are actually different. So what I have done in the past is either In a comment section about the jobs or just making some changes on the application itself, I would list the HR job title. So in the case of that solution designer to BA thing, something that would happen a lot is that I would either use like slash and the job title on the application. So business analyst slash solution designer, or if there was a little comment box anywhere, I would say official job title was X.

Diana Alt [00:11:23]:
The duties and responsibilities resembled why and that the market recognizes something like that. So a way that I saw this shake out really successfully for a client that I had, I worked on a really tricky resume for this client. They had had some very big lofty technical consulting roles that also had like sales responsibility and client relationship responsibility wrapped up into them. But for a major global consulting technology consulting company that the person had retired early and decided that they wanted to. They were not very good at being retired. They got bored with being retired and so they wanted to step into the healthcare IT industry. So they, they had grown passionate about that particular industry and they had gone and got some education specific to electronic health records and things like that that they needed to know. But they wanted basically what was a healthcare IT analyst job, which was lower than the jobs that they'd held before they early retired.

Diana Alt [00:12:31]:
But it was very much in line with where their zone of genius was. So what we ended up doing with that is a combination of things. Number one, there were responsibilities related to the consulting work that had to do with driving large scale enterprise system architecture. We deemphasize those. There were things on there about organic growth and client relationship type stuff. We eliminated things related to sales. We deemphasized client relationships a little bit, framed it a different way in terms of stakeholder management and things like that. Because when you're an IT healthcare IT analyst, you have to be able to relate to the users that you are designing the system for.

Diana Alt [00:13:13]:
So we didn't want to completely eliminate that ability to build good cloud client relationships. And so then we reframed a lot of the architect things they had to deal with basically understanding requirements, understanding systems, figuring out gaps, documenting requirements and making them happen. They are at. They were at a different level whenever she was this client was in the most senior architecture roles. But they are not at all irrelevant to healthcare IT information analysts for elsewhere. So we changed a lot of the lingo from being about architecting large systems to being about eliciting and gathering and documenting requirements and testing and things like that. So I really was excited to work on that because I spent a lot of years actually worked in health Care it for a while. I spent a lot of years as a business analyst so I deeply understood the role that the person was going for.

Diana Alt [00:14:08]:
It was a really fun project for me. And we also changed the job titles on the person's resume to better reflect the things that they were doing. So that's kind of the dial in the vocabulary and there's a little sign of the problems part in that example as well. The last thing you want to do is dial in your reason for switching gears and get really, really confident in it for when you walk into situations. So this does not mean that you have to ignore prior achievements with, you know, larger teams, larger systems, different responsibility. It simply means that you have to explain it. So as an examp with the person that was going from consulting to early retired to health care, that also involved a career gap, the person was just not working for a few years. So we developed a story around this that said look, I did these things.

Diana Alt [00:15:01]:
I loved working with clients, I loved designing systems. That was a vocabulary change we made designing instead of architecting. I love designing systems, I love making users life better. I was offered her early retirement package and I took it because it was kind of a no brainer to take it. I figured out that I was not enjoying being fully retired. I had most of my friends were still working, my spouse was still working and I decided I wanted to return back because I also missed solving problems for users. And so at this stage of my life I want to do that, but I don't necessarily want the travel and the same size of teams and whatnot. I'm very committed to applying this talent for solving these problems into a new context.

Diana Alt [00:15:47]:
So that was the narrative. We incorporated the narrative into the resume which immediately began getting hits, immediately began getting interview requests and then the person can move forward. So anyhow, that's kind of my three pillars. The problem scope, the vocabulary and the switching gears questions that you need to address. This will help you look like you are excited, qualified and you're going to be great to work with for the job that you are seeking. Last thing I want to address is the question of what if I'm applying for both things. So some people might still want to pursue the engineering manager job, but they're also at the point where they need to get back to work sooner rather than later if they can or they're stir crazy at home, those types of things. So they also want to apply for senior and principal roles.

Diana Alt [00:16:42]:
I think in that case you need two resumes. So in that situation my recommendation is always for resumes that you have a baseline resume that you may or may not have to tweak depending on the job that you're applying to. But you need a baseline resume for each problem scope that you are pursuing. So for the engineering manager that may be working on developer experience, large scale, kind of like policies or changes to how people are writing, building and doing code in the age of AI, or we need mentoring and quick development of junior resources on the team and we've got performance problems, whatever those things are, those are different problems. And so you're going to have a resume for engineering leadership and you're going to have a resume for like that senior principal high impact engineering role. That's really all I have for today. I hope that this was really helpful to some people and maybe empowers you to think differently about your experience, to maybe let go of some of your darlings on your resume that have to do with a role that you might hope to hold in the future, but you're not quite going to be applying for that right now. I just hope it helps you move through this particular question a lot more easily.

Diana Alt [00:17:59]:
This is a lot more nuanced than, oh well, we just need to only put your last 10 or 15 years of experience on your resume, like a lot of people talk about with ageism and overqualifications. In fact, sometimes that can be the opposite of what you want to do if you're applying for something that you did a number of years ago, more than just a few. Sometimes we have to get a little creative with resumes to highlight the things that relate to that slightly stepped back role that you're applying for. Last thing I want to say is a lot of people get fussy that these, these games that we're playing are. They're not fair, they're lying, et cetera, et cetera. Why does it matter? I would be the most qualified if I apply for this. Here's the thing. Explaining the problem scope correctly and how you meet it, and explaining with the right vocabulary and explaining why you want to switch gears.

Diana Alt [00:18:59]:
Those are key communication skills that are part of being qualified for a job in knowledge work anywhere on the planet at this point. So I know that it hurts sometimes when you're looking at I spent so many years trying to get to a place I don't really yet want to be back in a lower job title. But if you need to work and want to work and you're choosing to apply for those roles, you must recognize that explaining this fit is part of Being qualified, qualifications are not just years of experience and certifications that you have. I want to end with a little story about a client that I've been working with for a while. This is a client that had like a really unusual situation. They had been an L and D professional for many years and then they decided to have a consulting firm of their own for several years. And then after several years they decided that they wanted to go back in house. And initially we're targeting L and D management type roles, leadership, and ended up finding a job at a wonderful company that they were very, very aligned with.

Diana Alt [00:20:07]:
That was a lower job title of basically L and D trainer. This client did a brilliant job of explaining that path of why they went into consulting and why they're going back in house. And at the appropriate time they talked about what their future career aspirations were. So this client, they spoke to the problems of the job that they were applying for. They did a great job showcasing how they align with the values of the company. But then not very long afterwards, and it may have even been during the hiring process that some of this started to come out, but they became very clear, here's where I want to go in the future. And there was actually a leadership role that's a gap, it doesn't exist yet in the company that this person would like to hold in the future. And so they spent time working with a very supportive boss and skip level boss on what might it look like to have this function inside this company and what might I be able to bring to the table for this? And I just got a text from them the morning morning that I am recording this saying that they were did a presentation to a group of leadership in their department about the need for this.

Diana Alt [00:21:31]:
And then it looks like that whole role is going to the next step. So whether it for sure happens, whether it gets approved for budgets for next year, whether the person is selected for the job, all of that is unknown at this point. But he's been doing an excellent job in the role that he was hired for. He's made known what he wants to do and he has been patiently working through trying to make that come to fruition. Patient being a really keyword. So that's it for today. I hope that really helps you out. And if you need any help trying to figure out how to deal with changing what feels like overqualification into selling yourself the right way for different roles, reach out to me on LinkedIn, email, any of the places.

Diana Alt [00:22:19]:
That's it for today. Have a great day.