This 1 Unfair Job Interview Question Can Instantly Determine If You're Hired – And It’s Very Common

“What do you like to do in your spare time?”

If you’re in a job interview, think through your answer very carefully. Although this question has nothing to do with your relevant job skills and qualifications, it can be the reason you don’t get hired. 

Sociologist Lauren Rivera, a professor of management and organisations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, said across national and international surveys, this remains a common question job candidates get asked before the job interview officially starts. 

“Interviews can be a somewhat awkward interaction,” Rivera said. “There’s often a desire on the part of the evaluator to make the interviewee feel comfortable ... And one of the ways that interviewers most commonly do that is through asking questions about, ‘What do you like to do in your spare time?’”

But this is not just idle chitchat, because what you do when you’re not working can reveal your race, gender, class and caregiving responsibilities ― and it can give unfair weight to whether a manager sees you as a good fit for the role. 

Why This Interview Question Matters More Than Relevant Questions  

If your interviewer is wowed by your hobby, they may like you enough to hire you ― no matter how bad you might be for the job. 

That’s because interviewers are “anchoring on this perception of comfort and ease, which is gendered, which is racialised, which is classed,” Rivera said. If your interviewer skis and you mention how you ski on vacation, “that’s great. If you’re not a skier, if you’ve never gone skiing in your life, they may not be as interested.” 

Rivera has found this bias repeatedly through her research. In one 2010 study where she interviewed 120 professionals involved in hiring decisions at law firms, investment banking and management consulting firms, she found that certain resource-intensive, extracurricular accomplishments impressed top-tier firms more than others. 

For these employers, hiking to the summit of Kilimanjaro or Everest was a source of “true accomplishment” over just doing recreational hiking, which was seen as something “anybody could do,” according to these narrow-minded hiring professionals in the study. 

Using sports or extracurricular activities is “a Rorschach test,” Rivera said. “You can use it as a justification for anything you want.”

One additional problem with asking this icebreaker question is that humans have short attention spans, and your first answers are the ones your interviewer is likely to remember the most. 

“Interviewers typically make up their mind in the first 30 to 90 seconds of meeting someone,” Rivera said. “Whether or not they like the person or they think the person is a good fit for the role can change, but it takes an overwhelming amount of evidence in the opposite direction to change that initial anchor.”

What Managers Should Ask Instead

Ideally, a hiring manager should avoid asking this hobbies question altogether, because it can introduce these unfair biases towards or against candidates. 

Instead of doing icebreakers about where the candidate grew up, for example, be straightforward about needing to ask candidates structured questions for fairness. 

This could look like a hiring manager saying from the beginning, “I’m so excited to meet you. I am really interested to hear about your experiences, but we want to make sure that this process really does a good job of being fair to everybody, and also doing a job of identifying people who would be really interested in the role. So we’re going to right move right to the structured part of this,” Rivera outlined as an example. 

How To Answer This Unfair Interview Question —And Still Get The Job. 

Despite the subjective nature of this question, Rivera doesn’t recommend avoiding this question as a candidate if you actually want the job. 

“Part of what interviewers are judging job candidates on a large part is, ‘Do I like you? Do I see myself in you?’” Rivera said. “And so if you say, ‘I refuse to answer that,’ it is jarring to the conversation ... And you definitely don’t want to interrupt the flow.”

But you don’t have to play this chemistry game on an employer’s terms. Here’s how to stay true to yourself while answering this tricky question:

Prepare your hobbies in advance. 

Don’t wing your answer.

“Make a list of 10 or so hobbies and interests you’re comfortable with sharing,” recommended Cynthia Pong, founder of Embrace Change, a career coaching and training firm. “Think about how those could relate to the roles you’re seeking or the organisations you’re applying to in terms of reflecting your strengths, qualities, or values.”

Instead of saying you love to read, think of a specific book you could endlessly debate for its character or plot, for example, because that is more likely to lead to an engaging conversation.

“Think of something that is vivid, that would be interesting for you to talk about with your interviewer and that they might also share,” Rivera suggested. 

Don’t try to fake your answer. 

Who you are in the interview is who you will need to be for the job. So don’t pretend to have an interest in Formula 1 or tennis you don’t have. 

“Trying to tailor your answer too closely to what you think your interviewer wants to hear can backfire,” Pong cautioned. “Even in a tough market, interviews are still a two-way assessment. If you oversell a version of yourself that doesn’t match how you’d show up on the job, you’re setting yourself up for friction and misalignment down the road.”

Swivel the question back. 

You can also turn the question back on your interviewer after you respond with, “What about you?” Pong suggested. This way, you “keep the conversation flowing naturally and build rapport while gently shifting the spotlight.”

Of course, whether or not you get a job should not come down to whether you play the same high school sport as your future boss. It should not be a job candidate’s responsibility to figure out how to navigate this icebreaker question –– it should be an employer’s job to think of a less random, more fair question. 

“When it comes to equity and fairness, I think the onus really should be on the employers to train their staff to have better ways of ascertaining the underlying qualities they’re hoping to measure, as opposed to relying on this question,” Rivera said.