“大材小用”可能會更好

“大材小用”可能會更好

許多企業(yè)招聘的原則是：物盡其用，于是那些對于工作而言資歷過高的人就悲催地被拒絕，可是最新的研究表明，適當(dāng)?shù)哪芰Ω哂诠ぷ餍枨蟛拍芨玫丶ぐl(fā)員工的創(chuàng)造性。

測試中可能遇到的詞匯和知識：

superfluous多余的；不必要的；奢侈的[su?'p??fl??s]

snooty 傲慢的，自大的；目中無人的['snu?t?]

grovelling奴顏婢膝的；卑下的；卑躬屈節(jié)的['ɡr?v?li?]

slack松弛的；疏忽的；不流暢的[sl?k]

optimal最佳的；最理想的['?pt?m(?)l]

anecdote軼事；奇聞；秘史['?n?kd??t]

supersede取代；緊接著……而到來；推遲行動[,su?p?'si?d]

surfeit飲食過度；使飲食過度；飲食過度['s??f?t]

stultifying單調(diào)乏味的；使人變遲鈍的['st?ltifaii?]

Overqualified applicants will be your best hires（776 words）

By Andrew Hill

“You're overqualified” may be the worst of many bad reasons for not getting the job. The message to the candidate is plain: not only have you failed, you have also wasted time and effort building up redundant diplomas, superfluous career experience and unnecessary technical skills.

The glib rejection hides a range of concerns including the fear that such applicants will be too costly (even if they protest they are ready to work for below their market rate); too snooty (despite their grovelling displays of humility), or too hard to please (notwithstanding their desire for one thing and one thing only: that job).

Meanwhile, at the highest levels of most organisations, the cult of busyness prevails. The assumption that it is almost always great to be stretched, and terrible to be slack, encourages the idea that relentless striving, up to the brink of chronic overwork, is optimal. Downtime, on the other hand, has become a sin.

It turns out, though, that the joke is on the recruiters. A new study for the Academy of Management Journal suggests that once well-qualified employees have breezed through what they were hired to do, they often put the rest of their time to highly productive use.

This is a useful finding. Plenty of people find themselves in jobs they can do all too easily. Across the OECD, the Paris-based club of mostly rich nations, a quarter of workers report a mismatch between their skills and their job specification, with over-skilling more common than under-skilling. As automata advance up the professional payroll and well-qualified humans are driven to apply for lower-spec work, this gap will get wider. Knowing how to manage these people will become more important.

Fears that the overqualified will become demotivated are well-founded. Anecdotes abound about the fate of the extravagantly underworked. There was the French manager who last year sued the perfume distributor where he worked because he had become so bored that he had a breakdown. Or the Spanish civil servant accused of simply not turning up for at least six years after he was pushed into a dead-end job. People who knew him said he did in fact drop in at the office — but spent much of his time reading the work of Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher who is himself said to have been overqualified for his day job as a lens grinder.

The new study confirms the threat of boredom — but only when the distance between an employee's qualifications and the tasks he or she is carrying out becomes too great. Otherwise, Bilian Lin and Kenneth Law of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Jing Zhou of Rice University observed something different, and more positive. Staff with a bit of slack use their spare time to rethink how they do their jobs — a practice known as “task-crafting” — carry out more creative activities and contribute to the smooth running of their organisations.

The academics looked, for instance, at teachers who concentrated on making their classroom activities more stimulating, and factory technicians who used their surplus skills to come up with innovative new products.

The phenomenon made me think about the three women in the recent book and film Hidden Figures, who worked as part of a racially segregated group of “human computers” at Nasa during the early years of the space race in the 1950s and 1960s.

When early electronic computers threatened to supersede them, one of these women, Dorothy Vaughan, taught herself the Fortran programming language. She then transformed her team of skilled mathematicians and scientists, initially hired as “subprofessionals”, into experts in the new technology.

Some people will prefer to apply their surfeit of unused skills beyond the office (Spinoza being one striking example). But many of those trapped in a skills mismatch would be happier if they could make more of their working day, to their and their employers' mutual benefit.

One important unanswered question, though, is how managers can pinpoint where a team member is on the curve between useful underwork and stultifying boredom. There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution, says one of the new study's authors.

But there are examples of how it may pay to run a surplus of knowledge workers. Asked on Quora.com about the negative aspects of working at Google, one contributor responded: “The worst part is … that [workers are] overqualified for the job … When it's standard to be awesome, and the work isn't particularly tough to begin with, it's hard to differentiate.”

That may be true. But companies that can afford to hire awesome staff for less awesome tasks tend to stay ahead of the pack — provided they can stop useful underworkers succumbing to unproductive ennui.