Overqualification on the level of expected credentials--not that credentials are automatically connected to objective fitness for a job or epistemologically prove someone's job readiness--means that jobs might gratuitously require incredible and expensive amounts of formal educational credentials before even an employer will even consider someone for an interview. What they really want is to look at a mere piece of paper or an image asserting that someone has passed a given course, certification, or college program, which is not even the same as either having genuine knowledge or relevant experience. Documents can be falsified, and people can forget information or have cheated their way through their education (not that this is immoral in itself [1]). Certifications and degrees do not make someone competent or willing to adapt in training or the course of work afterward.
Beyond this, the insurmountable epistemological limitations concerning other minds and most sensory experiences already disqualifies credentials from being actual proof of anything except the presence of the documentation itself on the level of one's sensory perceptions, but that is too abstract for most employers and employees alike, since almost no one is actually a rationalist although almost everyone acts like they are rational! This pertains to the most egregious error of credentialism, which is holding credentials to be intelligence (rationality) or proof of it. Only rationalists are intelligent, for everyone else by nature only believes in and operates on assumptions. No amount of education makes someone rational, and no absence of education makes someone irrational. This is determined by each person's individual and voluntary alignment with the objective truths of reason, as they must recognize logical axioms as inherently true and thus self-evident and make no assumptions about worldview matters or practical life, which is still a subset of abstract philosophy. To the extent that someone does this, they are rational.
Non-rationalists simply might want to be regarded as intelligent or to feel like they are despite the impossibility of such a thing, and they might have invested so much effort into the pursuit of red herring credentials (which they fallaciously believed made them intelligent) that they are personally desperate to be validated. It is not because employers are rational that the needless trend of having credentials like a college degree as a relatively uniform job requirement has become more popular. It is because they are irrational: credentialism is asinine because it treats what is often arbitrary and irrelevant as a necessity for someone if they are going to perform a much more basic job than the listed requirements alone might suggest. This is in addition to the other philosophical errors already mentioned, like conflating education with intelligence or competence (which are themselves not identical).
In spite of the dramatically inflated credentials imposed on a broadened range of jobs, it is not credentials like a college degree that are most likely to secure someone a job. It is work experience, something that in turn is not a marker of rationality or competence, that is exalted more highly by plenty of employers. However, how can someone gain the experience needed to obtain many jobs if they can never enter a company/industry because they lack experience? Why is experience prioritized over rationality (which is illusory unless someone is a genuine rationalist as described), teachability, and/or demonstrated skill independent of a random number of years it was supposedly exercised in beforehand?
This, too, does not mean that someone is actually fit for a given job, although certain companies are becoming increasingly obsessed with making this an ultimate variable in their hiring decisions. Graduating college with a bachelor's degree does not have the same probabilistic weight for finding a job that it did in past decades. When companies inflate their credential requirements so that someone has to spend more and more time and money, perhaps going into lifelong debt in the process, to be considered, but especially when they couple this with a haphazard amount of required work experience, they deprive themselves of the chance to attract candidates that might be excellent--and more importantly, rational--workers in favor of irrationally selective criteria.
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