overselling and inflation of need in the job market?

Question

I am pretty sure that everyone in the job market will at the least have the tendency to oversell themselves in a job interview. One of the reason being that our culture is full of salesmanship. If you are humble and say unimpressive things about yourself you run the increased risk of not getting the job which affects your livelihood which leads to other serious problems.

On the other hand, based on my experience and human psychology, I think, the employers' need for certain skills and certain kinds of employees tend to be over-inflated. Enough times the jobs tend to turn out to be easier than how the employers advertise the job, and more people can do the job than what the employers say. What are your opinions about these two sides of coin in our job market?

Answer 1

I agree many people over sell themselves, partly out of ego, & partly to get better wages. Unfortunately, many of the best qualified folks are not good about selling themselves & don't always recognize they have job skills beyond the obvious ones from their previous position. By example I ran my own insurance agency for twenty years. Would that give me qualifying experience in marketing & public relations? Perhaps not for some, but it gave me an exceptional background in those areas.

I sold the business & "retired", but I'm too young to just sit around 24/7 so I took a job w a brokerage firm in their call center. I referred someone for hire twice. People I had spent enough time around to know they could handle the challenges of the clients we faced daily on the phone & be great "ambassadors" for the firm.

They were both declined as they were just short of completing two years of college, a required qualification. However I worked daily w folks who could barely figure out the most obvious of situations, & had very poorly developed phone skills. The company presumably knows what's best (yeah right), but their faulty criteria may explain the 50% first year attrition rate!!