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Comment by fractionalhare | Hacker News Reader

Hobbies don't have to be maximally mastered, no. But what's the point of putting something on your resume if you're not particularly good at it? In my opinion that's the only kind of thing that should be on a resume.

I think if you put a hobby on a resume for the purpose of signaling some kind of orthogonal skillset ostensibly related to the job (like in this example, "strategy"), it stops being just about your personality and becomes explicitly performance-oriented. And I would even argue your resume is not the play to round out your personality, because it's such an overly subjective and bias-inducing thing.

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Resumes are meant to be highly subjective and bias inducing things - you're trying to convince someone to hire you. Your resume is a brief summary of why you're a good fit for the company in general and the role in particular. An extremely large portion of that fit is your personality. Hobbies and interests are an excellent way to convey the type of person that you are. Putting down that you enjoy camping doesn't mean you are trying to convey that you will be useful in a survival situation, it means you'll probably get along well with Dan in accounting who is also quite the outdoorsman. There might be some jobs out there where you are highly siloed and your skillset is really the only thing that matters, but this is rare.

It's dumb to lie and say you enjoy chess when you don't, just like it's dumb to put any other lie on a resume, but if you do enjoy it then there's nothing wrong with communicating that you're the type of person who enjoys chess, which means you are probably a person who enjoys somewhat adversarial situations where you need to win with your logic and you are comfortable with taking short term losses for long term gains, a personality which would likely be both comfortable and familiar in a hedge fund environment.

> which means you are probably a person who enjoys somewhat adversarial situations where you need to win with your logic and you are comfortable with taking short term losses for long term gains

Sure - to which my next question becomes, are you actually good at it? If you're not, I don't professionally care if you personally enjoy it.

It doesn't matter if you're good at it - there is no evidence that being good at chess makes you better at any hedge fund related tasks or vice versa. However you should most definitely care if your employees like what they do and the environments they are in. Those who dislike some critical element of the job may be perfectly capable of doing it, but will have a very low barrier to jumping to other opportunities compared to someone who genuinely likes the job.

Let's say you're hiring people to work a fish market. One candidate loves going out on the boat and fishing in their spare time, the other hates the smell of fish. Both are fully capable of doing the job, which doesn't involve catching fish or being on a boat, but which does involve spending a lot of time with dead fish. Who do you think is more likely to stick with the job for an extended period of time and be pleasant to work alongside?

Some people want these things on resumes. Some people don't. That's called culture fit. If you insist on only including hobbies you're good at then it's a signal that someone who includes hobbies they're not good at might not enjoy working for you. The system works.

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