What Your Hobbies Can Say About You to the Hiring Manager

After years of study and hard work at university, maybe an underpaid internship where it was you who paid with dues, you’ve accumulated experience and have acquired and proved your skills. Now you’ve been asked to come in for a job interview.

Since you are more than qualified for the position you’re applying for and your resume is impressive with its lists of accomplishments and credentials, you probably want the interviewer to focus exclusively on matters that pertain to your professional life and to the job at hand. But it is more than likely that at some point during the hiring process, the hiring manager or the person who will be your direct manager will try to veer the conversation toward something else – your hobbies or interests.

This is a great opportunity for you to demonstrate to them that you are the right person to hire, that you would be able to integrate easily into the team, and you would prove to be a valuable asset for the team.

In this short article, we’ll take a look at how you can take a seemingly benign subject like hobbies and interests and talk about them in such a way that your candidacy will stand out from all the others.

At the Heart of a Hobby

Every hobby, every interest is born from a passion. This passion is the expression of intellectual curiosity. Demonstrating to the hiring manager or prospective employer that you are an intellectually curious person, someone who follows their passion is a big advantage to you. In fact, along with passion, intellectual curiosity is one of the top skills employers look for in employees.

When the hiring manager asks you about your hobbies or interests, this is your opportunity to accomplish the following:

• Share how exactly your hobby was born from intellectual curiosity.
• Talk about that first moment that made you curious and what steps you took to follow your curiosity.
• Share how you have maintained that hobby or interest over a long period of time.
• Mention how you explored your interest during different stages in your life. Try to have the hiring manager come away with the idea that you are someone who sticks with things, who doesn’t lode interest, and follows their passion despite the many changes life throws our way.
• Communicate your change in level from when you first started exploring your interest to now.
• Mention improvements you’ve made and the steps and time it took to make those improvements. The hiring manager or prospective employer should come away with the sense that you are someone who is interested in improving themselves and that you possess the focus and determination to see that it’s done.

A Hobby Is a Different World You Have Adapted To

Every hobby or interest is by definition something that is not a part of your “regular” or “normal” life. By definition, a hobby (at least initially) requires the practitioner to leave their comfort zone and familiarize themself with a different zone, a different way of seeing and doing things, with different rules and different priorities.

Any job, with any company in any sector of activity, will require the employer to learn something new and adapt to a new environment with new rules and new priorities. When you are provided with the opportunity to speak about your hobbies or interests, it would be in your best interest to make those hobbies or interests as far from what their expectations of you might be.

Every hobby or interest comes with it a community devoted to that hobby or interest. There is invariably a whole world that spins around that interest. Talking about a hobby is also a way for you to communicate to the hiring manager or prospective employer that you have successfully adapted to a “new world” and that you have successfully integrated their community.

Transferable Skills That Go Into a Hobby

Transferable skills (also known as soft skills) are meant to define how you work and how you interact with others. They can range from organizational skills to problem-solving skills and any variety of interpersonal skills – communication, empathy, teaching, motivating, etc.

Transferable skills are highly valued by hiring managers and prospective employers. Before you go in for your job interview, take some time to think about the transferable skills you would like to impress upon the interviewer(s). Then think about how your hobby or interest has offered you the opportunity to put those transferable skills into practice. 

You don’t need to make it obvious in your answer (though, in the context of a job interview, being overly obvious can’t hurt). The hiring manager or prospective employer is already going to be on the lookout for what transferable skills you bring to the table. Even subtle inferences are important in this context and are likely to be picked up on.

The Bottom Line

It is only a question of time before the hiring manager or prospective employers veers the conversation away from what’s professional and asks you about your hobbies or interests. This is a great opportunity for you to convince them that you possess intellectual curiosity, passion, determination, and the ability to adapt, improve, and see things through. You can accomplish this by simply putting a bit of thought into your hobbies and how you can talk about them.

To get all the benefits out of answering the what are your hobbies job question, you should definitely be prepared with answers and anecdotes you can drop when prompted to.