高才低就未必没前途

“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.

“你的资历太高”可能是求职被拒的诸多糟糕理由中最差的一个。它传递给求职者的信息很明白：你不仅失败了，而且还把时间和精力浪费在积累多余的学历、过剩的职业经历和没必要的技能上。

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).

用这种圆滑的借口来拒绝求职者，背后隐藏了一系列的担忧，这包括担心雇用求职者的成本过高(即便他们强烈声明已准备好接受低于他们的市场价格的工作);担心他们太自大(即便他们会低声下气展现他们的谦卑);担心他们不容易满足(尽管他们想要的有且只有这一样东西：这份工作)。

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.

同时，在大多数机构的最高层，对于“忙碌”的崇拜很盛行。有关“全力以赴是最伟大的，偷懒放松则是可憎的”这种思想，鼓励了这一种观点：坚持不懈的努力，直至濒临长期过度操劳的边缘，是最优的。另一方面，放松休整则成了一种罪过。

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.

然而事实证明，闹笑话的往往是招聘方。《管理学会期刊》(Academy of Management Journal)一份新的研究表明，一旦资质良好的员工对本职工作轻松掌握之后，通常会富有成效地运用他们的剩余时间。

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.

这是一个有用的发现。很多人发现自己的工作完全可以很轻松完成。在总部位于巴黎、主要由富国组成的经济合作组织(OECD)的成员国中，四分之一的员工报告自己所具备的劳动技能和职位要求之间不匹配，其中“技能过剩”比“技能不足”更常见。随着自动化推高专业人士的薪资，而高资历的人员被迫去申请较低等的职位，这种过剩将越来越大。懂得怎么管理这些人将变得更为重要。

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.

担心资历过高的人在工作中会变得消极，这是有根据的。有关工作太轻松的人有不少逸闻趣事。法国一名经理人去年起诉了他所供职的香水分销商，原因是他因无聊而患上了神经衰弱。还有一名西班牙的公务员受指控有至少6年没有上班，只因他干着一份没前途的工作。认识他的人说他事实上去了办公室——但大多数时间都是在阅读巴鲁赫•斯宾诺莎(Baruch Spinoza，见上图)的著作，这位荷兰哲学家对于他那磨镜片的日常工作据称也是“资历过高”的。

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.

新的研究证实无聊会带来威胁——但只有当雇员的资历跟他们所从事的工作之间的差距变得太大时才会成立。反之，则如同香港中文大学的林碧莲和罗胜强，以及美国莱斯大学周京所观察到的不同的、更为积极的情况，在工作中略有余力的雇员会利用自己的空闲时间来重新思考如何完成他们的工作——这是一种被称为“任务重塑”的做法——他们会开展更有创造力的活动，为所在机构的顺利运作做出贡献。

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.

例如，学者们观察了那些专注于让他们的课堂活动变得更生动活泼的老师，以及那些运用自己的额外技能设计出创新性的新产品的工厂技师。

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.

这一现象让我联想到最近的一本书和同名电影《关键少数》(另译：隐藏人物，Hidden Figures)中的三名女性，她们在50至60年代的太空竞赛初期，供职于美国航空航天局(NASA)一个被称为“人类计算机”的种族隔离小组。

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.

当早期电子计算机有取代她们之势时，其中一位叫桃乐斯•范恩(Dorothy Vaughan)的女性自学了Fortran编程语言。此后，她重新改造了自己带领的由数学家和科学家组成的技术团队，她们最初是作为“次专业人员”而被雇用，转型后成为新技术的专家。

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.

有些人喜欢在办公室以外运用自己未派上用场的剩余技能(斯宾诺莎就是一个突出的例子)，但是对于很多苦于职业技能不匹配的人来说，如果他们能够更善于利用自己的工作日，用来做对自己和雇主都有利的事情，他们会感到更加幸福。

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.

然而，一个重要的未解问题是：在有益的工作松懈和无效的无聊之间这条曲线上，管理者该如何辨别团队成员正处什么位置。这份新研究的作者之一表示，没有“一刀切”的解决方案。

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.”

但有案例显示，手下有一批技能过剩的知识型员工可能会带来很大的回报。在美国问答网站Quora.com上回答关于在谷歌工作的消极方面的问题时，一个答题者说：“最糟糕的部分是……(雇员)对于他们的工作来说资历过高……如果别人眼中的‘真棒’在这里只是平均标准，而工作本身又不是特别难上手，就很难脱颖而出。‘”

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.

这或许是真的。然而凡能雇用“真棒”的员工来从事不那么“棒”的工作的公司，往往都能保持业界领先——只要他们能防止那些工作过于轻松的有用之才被徒然的厌倦弄得崩溃。