Beneath the bar admissions and the T14 law schools, some of the résumés Kate Reder Sheikh placed last year had an extra line. Training miniature dachshunds. Building birdhouses. And, from one counsel, “perfecting restaurant-quality scrambled eggs.” Those, she says, are the details that make a hiring partner think: yes, this is someone I’d like to be in the trenches with at three in the morning on a deadline.
Reder Sheikh, a partner at the legal recruiter Major, Lindsey & Africa, says more than half the associates she placed last year listed hobbies, a jump from a few years ago. The reason is on every recruiter’s desk. “AI is pushing out résumés that all look the same,” said Richard King, who runs a corporate recruitment company in Los Angeles. “Let’s bring the human back.” Interests were common on résumés until the mid-2010s, when firms told candidates to strip anything noncore to reduce hiring bias. Now the page is generic by construction and the personal line is the only thing a glassy-eyed reviewer reads twice.
Olive oil and the Nutcracker
The debate went public in January when an anonymous banker posted about a candidate who listed “olive oil” as an interest: “It’s been hours and I cannot stop thinking about it. There will not be an interview.” The internet mostly took the candidate’s side, and so did Fred Cibelli, a technology principal at EY, who said that assuming the person met the requirements he would want to hear about the olive oil in the interview. “There’s only so many times you can talk about what’s going on with open versus closed models in AI.”
Dawn Choo, a data scientist applying to Facebook years ago, debated whether her performance in the Washington Ballet’s “Nutcracker” was “too girly” for a male-dominated field. She listed it, got only positive reactions, and got the job; she now runs her own company in Tennessee. Jack Kolb, a 24-year-old analyst in Chicago who coached fellow students into banking jobs, calls the interests line possibly the most important on the page for a qualified candidate, because the banker deciding whether to take a networking call is thinking, “If I agree to a call with this kid, am I going to be bored to death?” His own: extreme skiing, Blackhawks hockey, “The Office.” A classmate listed red hair. Another, hot-dog-eating contests. All got jobs.
The rules, per the recruiters: last section, one line only, specific, and ideally hinting at a useful trait — grit, organization. Never “sports, music or food.” “Every single person on planet Earth is interested in those things.”
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The mechanism here is general. When the average product becomes free to produce, the average product becomes worthless, and the premium moves to whatever is specific and verifiably human. That is happening to résumés; it is happening to financial advice, where a plan generated from a questionnaire now costs nothing and a plan built from an hour of actual conversation is the whole value. It is also, quietly, happening to the stock market, where the index is the commodity and the question is what an owner knows about the four names that are half the book.
For the reader who is job hunting, or whose kid is: one line, at the end, specific enough that a stranger would ask about it. For the reader who has stopped job hunting, it is a decent question anyway. What is the line? A plan that includes it — the trip, the workshop, the marathon at 60 — is a plan someone will actually follow.