Overqualified is a prediction, not a qualification
The word sounds like a measurement, but it is a guess. It predicts that the person will be bored, will leave, or will cost too much. None of those are facts on the resume. They are forecasts, and like most forecasts made in two seconds from a job title and a date range, they are wrong a large share of the time. Screening someone out for being overqualified means rejecting a real, present strength because of an imagined future problem.
The two real risks, named honestly
There are two legitimate worries hiding under the word, and they deserve to be stated plainly rather than smuggled in behind a label. The first is flight risk: the person takes the role, keeps looking, and leaves when something better appears. That is real, but it is not unique to senior applicants, and it is testable. The second is cost: their last salary sat above your band, so they will either decline the offer or accept it and resent it. Also real, and also testable, in a single honest conversation.
Everything else the word tends to carry, that they will be difficult to manage, that they will look down on the work, that they will resist a younger manager, is bias, not risk. Name the two that are real, test them, and let the rest go.
What the reflex throws away
A candidate who exceeds the role brings things the perfectly scoped candidate cannot. They ramp in days rather than months. They need less supervision on day one. They raise the level of the people around them without needing a title to do it. And a meaningful share of them are choosing a lower-intensity role on purpose, after a remote move, a caregiving season, a burnout, a relocation, or a simple decision to trade climbing for stability. Those are often your most stable hires, not your least, because they have already decided they want exactly this.
Ask the question instead of assuming the answer
The entire risk collapses into one honest question: why this role, and why now. A candidate with a specific, credible reason, they want remote, they are deliberately winding down, they are changing lanes, they value the mission, they need predictability for a stretch of life, is telling you they are not treating you as a placeholder. A candidate who cannot answer it, or who frames the role as obviously beneath them, is telling you the opposite. The answer, not the count of years on the page, is the signal.
When the no is actually correct
Passing is the right call in three cases, and really only these three. The pay gap is genuinely unbridgeable and they will not accept the band. They describe the role themselves as a stopgap until their real search lands. Or they can offer no reason for wanting it beyond needing any job at all. Notice that all three come from what the person actually says, not from a tally of their experience. You reach a defensible no by asking, not by filtering.
The screen that actually works
Replace the overqualified reflex with two checks: a motivation question early, and a frank pay conversation before you invest interview rounds. That is the whole fix. It costs one question and one honest exchange, and it stops you from auto-rejecting the person who could start Monday and outlast everyone in the building. A heuristic of years over a threshold is easy to automate and easy to be wrong with. The question is harder to automate and almost always right, which is exactly why it belongs to a human and not to a filter.
Thabiti Adams is a CISSP and CCSP certified cybersecurity professional and founder of Adams Cloud and Cybersecurity, which operates TrueScan HR.