To Hobby or Not to Hobby? That is the Question

The debate as to whether to include hobbies and interests on your CV rages on. The “Hobbiers” argue that including such detail provides an insight into the person’s personality and may inform whether they will be fun to work with. The “anti-Hobbiers” argue that what is important is that the person can do the job; “why should I care that a job applicant can hop on one leg whilst juggling balls of fire?” Unfortunately, there is little scientific evidence to support arguments falling on either side of the debate. However, research into CV content and the effect that content has on hiring decisions can give us some pointers on what to include and what to leave out when applying for a job.

Before looking at the research, it’s important to note that contrary to popular belief, most companies don’t have a magical Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that automatically screens out applicants. Sure, most ATS’s will rank applicants based on a variety of measures which are determined by the system and the configuration being used by the company; this helps recruiters manage their time and focus on speaking to candidates who are most likely to match the requirements for the job. Most job applicants are still screened by a human and are subject to human bias and error in the selection process. Personality cues as-well-as technical information play a large part in the decision to progress or decline an application.

Recruiters review hundreds of job applications every day. Due to the volume of applicants to be screened, recruiters, like most people, use mental shortcuts to reach a conclusion as to whether the candidate will be submitted for further screening by the hiring team. Mental shortcuts or biases are typically developed by using past experience as the marker for making decisions in the here and now. For instance, say a recruiter has a depth of experience in recruiting for a particular skill set; the recruiter is likely to have recruited this skill set many times in the past and will have a subjective opinion of what works and what doesn’t for that role. Applying their subjective ‘knowledge’ they make a relatively quick decision on whether someone should move forward in the interview process. This can be in the form of the type of company that someone works for, the length of experience they have, which school they attended, and according to research published in 2009, recruiters will also make inferences on personality from the information contained in the CV.

The personality inferences made during the review process have a significant impact on whether the applicant will be progressed to further rounds of screening. The Big Five personality traits (Extroversion, Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) have been used in the field of personality research since the early nineties. The relationship between these personality traits and work performance has been studied extensively and has provided strong evidence of a link between conscientiousness, extroversion, and openness with high job performance. Using mental shortcuts, recruiters, often subconsciously make judgements on these personality traits using cue information in a person’s CV. This information is used to decide on whether the person should be progressed to the next stage of the hiring process.

This may not immediately seem like this is an issue. If there is robust evidence demonstrating that these personality traits correlate with high job performance, then it makes sense to use these as selection criteria. Unfortunately, a recruiter’s inferences of applicant personality based on CV cues is often invalid. In one experiment job applicants were given a personality test prior to their CV being reviewed by recruiters. Following the resume review, the recruiters were asked to complete a questionnaire to ascertain how much they were able to infer about the applicant’s personality based on CV information. The result show that a recruiter’s judgement of personality is often invalid and unreliable. Meaning that a recruiter will often make the wrong judgement when deciding who to progress for a job role.

Based on the evidence available to us we can infer that the information you include on your CV will have a significant impact on whether you are successful in gaining an interview. This brings us back to the original question, should you include hobbies and interests in your CV?

Writing the hobbies and interests section is an opportunity to include information that will highlight your unique personality traits, possibly more so than listing your job experience. Listing job information, projects, and skills will possibly give some cues to the personality traits mentioned above. Adding your hobbies and interests may allow you to give the reviewer a helping hand by bringing your personality to life and giving a more overt view of your personality.

Given that perceived personality has such a strong influence on the judgement being made, it is important to remember that both positive and negative indicators will be used by the reviewer of the CV. Before including your hobbies and interests you should think carefully about what you want them to say about you. Listing “walking” as a hobby is not likely to speak to the CV reviewer in any meaningful way. Listing “walking: I once walked the entire length of the UK western coastline to raise vital funds for charity” may give a signal that you are toward the high end of the scale for openness and conscientiousness and so may increase your chances of an interview by giving more of a signal to the reviewer. Judging by this example, I’m clearly low on the creativity dimension, but hopefully, you get the point.

Including your hobbies and interests in your CV allows you to highlight, in bright shiny lights, the personality traits that may be perceived as job suitability. If you can draw on hobbies and interests that give the reviewer an insight into your personality, particularly those that have been linked to high job performance, then you should absolutely include them in your CV. Not everyone is an adventurer, many people have life commitments that don’t allow time for the pursuit of outside interests. If this is the case, then it may be best to not include them. Trying to create hobbies and interests or just writing “cooking, reading, walking” to use up space is likely to do more harm than good and should be omitted from your CV.