Most career advice tells you to drop the hobbies section. Most career advice is wrong on this one.
The real question is not whether to include hobbies on a CV. It is whether the hobby you picked says something a recruiter can use. A line that reads "Reading, traveling, music" is filler. A line that reads "Captain of an amateur 5-a-side football team, organizing a weekly schedule for 14 players" is a leadership signal you cannot fit anywhere else on the page.
When hobbies actually help
Three situations where the section earns its space:
- You are early-career or changing fields. When the work history is thin, hobbies can show transferable skills you would otherwise have no place to demonstrate. A junior accountant who runs a small Etsy shop is signalling commercial awareness without saying the word.
- The role is culture-heavy. Startups, agencies, sports brands, and a lot of customer-facing roles do screen for fit. A hobby that overlaps with the company's product or audience is a small but real bridge.
- You have a genuinely unusual one. Competitive chess, ultramarathons, beekeeping. Not because they are "impressive" but because they give the interviewer a hook to start the conversation. Most candidates do not have one. You stand out by accident.
When to leave them off
- The CV is already over one page and you are squeezing experience to fit them in. Cut the hobbies, keep the work.
- The role is senior. Once you are five-plus years in, your last three jobs are the story. Recruiters scanning a director-level CV for the cooking section will think you are out of material.
- Your hobby is genuinely controversial or risky. Political activism, anything religious, anything that could read as polarizing. Recruiters are humans with biases, fair or not, and you do not get to argue back from a CV.
- You are listing things you do not actually do. "Yoga" because it sounds wholesome, "reading" because everyone says it. If you cannot talk about it for two minutes in the interview, do not put it on the CV.
How to write a hobby line that does work
The trick is to add a verb and a number. Compare:
- Weak: Photography
- Strong: Street photography — published one photo essay on Medium (2,400 views, 2024)
Or:
- Weak: Volunteering
- Strong: Volunteer English tutor at a refugee center, 3 hours/week since 2023
The weak versions are wallpaper. The strong versions are short stories. A recruiter reading the strong version already has a question to ask you, and that question is the start of the interview.
What recruiters actually do with this section
Honestly? Most skim it in two seconds. The section's job is not to be read carefully. Its job is to be safe (no red flags) and to leave one or two small hooks the interviewer can pick up if the conversation needs a warm opener.
That is also why "Reading, traveling, music" is so common and so useless. Every CV says it. Nothing about you sticks.
Hobbies and the ATS — a brief reality check
Applicant tracking systems do not score hobbies. They scan for skills, titles, and keywords against the job description. So the hobbies line is purely for the human reader, not the bot. Which means: do not stuff it with keywords from the job ad. That is a different anti-pattern and recruiters spot it instantly.
If you do want to make sure the rest of your CV passes the bot, that is a different problem — covered in our guide on ATS keyword optimization.
A short checklist before you publish the CV
- One section, one line, three to five items max.
- Every item has a verb or a number (or both).
- Nothing controversial, nothing you would not discuss for two minutes in an interview.
- If experience is squeezed, cut hobbies first.
If you build your CV from your LinkedIn data with Postulit, the hobbies section is one of the few places where adding a human, specific detail by hand still pays off. Tools can rephrase your job titles. They cannot decide that your Sunday football team is more interesting than "reading."
The hobbies section is not where you win the job. It is where you avoid being forgettable. That is a smaller goal — and worth getting right.