Being overqualified for a job only protects you from discrimination if the work is mind-numbingly simple.
April 3, 2026
Original Paper
Hiring Discrimination and the Task Content of Jobs: Evidence from a Large-Scale Résumé Audit
arXiv · 2604.01933
AI-generated illustration
The Takeaway
In high-level roles requiring analytical or social skills, having better credentials fails to close the racial hiring gap. Because these 'elite' jobs allow for more subjective manager opinions, resumes cannot fix the bias that credentials usually solve in lower-level work.
From the abstract
We conducted a large-scale resume audit of 36,880 applications to 9,220 job advertisements for new college graduates across the United States. Firms express task preferences through job-advertisement text, which we link to occupation-level task measures from O*NET and the American Community Survey. We develop a model in which discrimination increases with evaluative discretion, defined as the share of hiring decisions driven by subjective rather than verifiable assessment. Callback gaps vary sys