“大材小用”可能会更好

许多企业招聘的原则是：物尽其用，于是那些对于工作而言资历过高的人就悲催地被拒绝，可是最新的研究表明，适当的能力高于工作需求才能更好地激发员工的创造性。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

superfluous多余的；不必要的；奢侈的[suː'pɜːflʊəs]

snooty 傲慢的，自大的；目中无人的['snuːtɪ]

grovelling奴颜婢膝的；卑下的；卑躬屈节的['ɡrɔvəliŋ]

slack松弛的；疏忽的；不流畅的[slæk]

optimal最佳的；最理想的['ɒptɪm(ə)l]

anecdote轶事；奇闻；秘史['ænɪkdəʊt]

supersede取代；紧接着……而到来；推迟行动[,suːpə'siːd]

surfeit饮食过度；使饮食过度；饮食过度['sɜːfɪt]

stultifying单调乏味的；使人变迟钝的['stʌltifaiiŋ]

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.

1.What is not one of the reasons overqualified applicants are rejected?

A.Hiring them would be too costly

B.They will be too arrogant during work

C.They will soon leave the firm because of boredom

D.They might be hard to please

答案(1)

2.How many workers in OECD countries believe they are overqualified for their jobs?

A.20%

B.25%

C.30%

D.50%

答案(2)

3.Why a small distance between employee's qualifications and job requirements is beneficial?

A.They may rethink how they do their jobs and carry out creative ideas

B.There would be less pressure on them

C.There would be less mistakes during work

D.It creates a good working environment

答案(3)

4.What is the question in terms of solving the skills mismatch?

A.Employees might be unaware of the benefits of useful underwork

B.There is no universal solution to turn boredom into useful underwork

C.It would too costly to do that

D.It would cause employees' inefficiency

答案(4)

(1)答案：C.They will soon leave the firm because of boredom

解释：许多资历过高的应聘者受拒的原因包括雇佣他们可能费用过高、在工作时态度傲慢难以取悦等等。

(2)答案：B.25%

解释：四分之一的（a quarter）世界经济合作与发展组织成员国的员工认为他们自身能力比所从事工作所要求的要高。

(3)答案：A.They may rethink how they do their jobs and carry out creative ideas

解释：研究表明，如果员工在工作时有些许的空闲会有助于他们反思自己的工作水平，并能够促使他们提出创新的观点为企业发展做贡献。

(4)答案：B.There is no universal solution to turn boredom into useful underwork

解释：解决这一问题目前的瓶颈是雇主如何让员工的工作强度处于恰好的平衡而非无用的空闲，对于这一问题是没有通用的答案的。