The Underemployed as a Source of Strategic Human Capital for Competitive Advantage

Many organizations hold the traditional view that due to the potential of higher job dissatisfaction and employee turnover rates, hiring overqualified job candidates is risky. Instead, this paper uses Human Capital and Resource Based theories to propose that hiring overqualified job candidates from the overall underemployment labor pool adds to an organization’s human capital depth. This additional human capital depth helps organizations strengthen their intellectual capital, social capital, and organizational agility. Subsequently, these additional organizational capabilities are proposed to improve firm performance, and over time, build competitive advantage. Thus, our model makes reference to deployment of the underemployed as an underutilized source of strategic human capital. Finally, the implications of our proposed conceptualization and directions for future research are discussed.