Why sometimes harder to get a job you’re ‘overqualified’ for

Yeah I remember thinking this when I was a teenager and employing econ101 logic... like you could just apply for lower qualification jobs and they would be easier to get. Specifically I thought that as a programmer it would be easy to get IT or sys admin type jobs.

The market isn't like that at all. They want someone who is exactly so qualified (according to their definition), neither more nor less.

It's a challenge. One time I applied for a job at a university and left out the fact that I had a PhD, something my boss found out about a few months after I got hired.

The fact was the rest of my resume was strong and the job was a good fit. It would have been a reasonable guess that I was trying to "get a foot in the door" and move to a "better" position but that was (and is) not the case at all.