If you are preparing your applications, you may be tempted to highlight your interests. You may have already mentioned some passions or hobbies on the CV. How to highlight them and draw strengths and real skills from them during interviews? We give you our tips!
Centers of interest are a particularity of the CV and the rather French recruitment processes. Indeed, in the Anglo-Saxon world of work, there will be more emphasis on leisure from the angle of accomplishments or rewards obtained. This more professional approach to centers of interest is not devoid of interest, since it makes it possible to better promote skills developed outside the professional framework. But then, how can you highlight this section in interviews and on your CV in France?
Centers of interest on the CV: how to promote them?
The importance of interests on a CV
Interests are an essential element of the CV. For some, this is a section that can serve candidates poorly. However, it is an integral part of your application which will allow you to bring the conversation to lighter subjects or to important elements of your profile which have not been developed in the section on your professional experience.
Interests should be mentioned on the CV because they tell something about you. If you indicate that you were captain of your high school football team, it means that you are capable of leading a team and working within a group. If you are passionate about traveling and have visited around thirty countries, this demonstrates your open-mindedness and can demonstrate your agility. Mentioning interests on the CV is therefore essential. But how to promote them?
Highlighting interests on a CV
First of all, it is important to be very precise in this section. Don’t put “fashion”, “sport”, “travel”. You must indicate how these passions are constitutive of your career and how they can be promoted in business. So, you can indicate “fashion accessories designer” or “captain of the handball team”. This already allows us to highlight certain skills such as entrepreneurship, creativity, leadership, team spirit, etc.
Then you can totally talk about your accomplishments. If you designed an outfit that won a prize at an amateur fashion show, you absolutely have to include it on your CV! If you took your team to the final of your department’s championship, that’s also a victory worth mentioning. If you want to work in depth on this section, you can detail, as with your professional experiences, the great successes you have encountered in your hobbies and even mention the skills you have developed.
Interests on the CV: examples
If you don’t necessarily know how to highlight your interests on the CV, here is an example of how you can indicate them:
As you can see, we were able to take advantage of the areas of interest and the travel section to remind people of the presence of a university exchange, an element to highlight in their CV that many candidates forget. The skills developed allow you to demonstrate that you have a critical perspective on your experiences, but also that you have skills that will make the difference for the position for which you are applying.
Highlight your interests in an interview
Obviously, it is also important to know how to promote these areas of interest during recruitment interviews. Whether you have decided to develop this section of your CV or not, the recruiter may ask you about your passions or hobbies.
Here again, you need to be well prepared and know how to capitalize on your interests through the skills developed. If your recruiter asks you to talk about your sporting experience. Don’t just say, “I played club football for 6 years.” Talk about your role within your team, your successes, your accomplishments. If you had responsibilities, you should mention it! You can also talk about your failures, while explaining what it taught you. For example, you can say: “Our team lost quite early in the regional football championship. It made us question ourselves. We took a more analytical approach to our team, observing each person’s strengths and weaknesses to perform better the following year.”
Once again, the objective is not to simply talk about your experience, but also to highlight key skills that can make the difference in an interview. Be careful to highlight interests and skills that are related to the position for which you are applying.
Tell me about yourself: the art of highlighting your interests at the start of the interview
Some candidates dare to mention their interests, hobbies and passions from the start of the interview, during the presentation. This can make the difference, but you still have to bring it well. When you talk about yourself and your personality, you can highlight a skill through a center of interest. This is the opposite path to what we mentioned previously. Rather than explaining how a hobby allowed you to develop a certain skill, you give a concrete example of this skill, applied to a passion.
Let’s take the example of football again. If you want to mention in your presentation that you are a person attracted to teamwork and that you tend to take leadership, you can indicate: “I am naturally more comfortable within a group and I I tend to show my leadership when the group needs me. As captain of my town’s football team, I demonstrated this ability during a departmental competition which allowed me to lead my team to victory by remotivating the troops and emphasizing the strengths of everyone to enhance them. »
Regardless of when you decide to talk about your interests in an interview, it is important to note that this exercise must be prepared. Behind each line of your CV or cover letter there is a potential question that you must know how to answer in an argumentative manner, demonstrating your strengths with concrete examples.
