How to Write a Hobbies and Interests Section for a Resume (+ Examples)

A hobbies and interests section is a short closing block — usually one or two lines — listing activities you do outside work that say something useful about you as a candidate.

It sits last, below education, skills, certifications and any volunteering. TopResume notes that hobbies and interests can appear in one of three places: a separate Hobbies and Interests section, inside the Work Experience section, or inside a Skills or Competencies section. It is optional either way. CareerOneStop lists optional resume sections as professional memberships or associations, publications or other work products, community involvement or volunteering, and awards or honors — hobbies are not a required part of the document.

It earns its place only when the resume still fits the 1–2 pages CareerOneStop recommends.

The alternative is not always "leave it off." There are four realistic ways to handle the same information, and the right one depends on how much space you have and how closely the activity maps to the job.

ResumeBuilder.com's reasoning for the last row is worth repeating: hiring managers scan resumes to see whether you meet minimum qualifications, and an interests section can take up valuable space without helping show that you qualify.

Use the specific activity + proof of scale + implied job link pattern. Name the thing precisely, add a number, a tool or a frequency, and pick only activities that already line up with the posting. Jobscan suggests matching hobbies to job requirements — team sports for a teamwork requirement, a musical instrument or strategy games for creativity and problem-solving.

Weak

Interests: reading, travel, music, sports, movies, spending time with family

Strong

Interests: competitive chess (club ladder, 2 rated tournaments a year); long-distance cycling (3 charity century rides since 2022); restoring valve radios

The strong version gives a reader something concrete to picture and ask about in an interview; the weak version is five words that could describe almost anyone who applied.

1. Check whether you have the space. Fill the resume with experience, skills and education first. CareerOneStop recommends 1–2 pages, using two only if the amount of experience requires it, and putting your name on each page when you use two. If adding hobbies pushes you onto a thin second page, cut them.
2. Read the job ad and pull the keywords. Work through the duties, requirements and qualifications and write down the recurring words — "collaborate," "public-facing," "bilingual," "attention to accuracy," "community." CareerOneStop gives this advice explicitly for federal applications: obtain the Job Opportunity Announcement and analyse its Duties, Requirements and Qualifications sections, paying attention to keywords. The same method works for any posting.
3. Shortlist the hobbies that map to those words. For each candidate activity, write the requirement it supports. If you cannot name one, it does not go on the resume.
4. Write each item with a specific noun and a measure. "Photography" becomes "film photography (develop and print black-and-white at a community darkroom, ~20 rolls a year)." "Running" becomes "trail running (two 50K races since 2023)."
5. Cut to three to five. ResumeBuilder.com's limit is three to five at most, relevant only. Format them as a single comma-separated line or one short bulleted row — not a block of bullets that competes with your experience.
6. Screen for anything that invites assumptions. Political campaigning, religious activity, firearms, anything that reads as a liability risk — the reaction varies by employer, state and industry, and you will not be there to explain. If you are in doubt, leave it out or reframe it by the skill rather than the affiliation.
7. Check it survives a scan and a parser. CareerOneStop notes that a person typically scans a resume for 15–20 seconds and that qualifications should be easy to find quickly using terms that match the job posting; elsewhere it puts the typical scan at under 10 seconds. It also notes that applicant tracking systems are common enough that resumes should be built to work with them, and that because those systems scan left to right, a simple single-column layout is best. Keep the hobbies line as plain text in the same font and size as the rest of the body — no icons, no columns, no graphics.

Each line below is written as it would appear at the bottom of the resume, labelled Interests or Hobbies and Interests. Two per field: one for an early-career applicant, one for someone further along.

Software development

Junior developer

Interests: home-lab automation (Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant across 12 devices); open-source contribution (6 merged pull requests to a Python CLI tool); competitive chess.

Backend engineer, 6 years

Interests: mentoring at a weekend coding meetup (8–10 attendees per session); mechanical keyboard builds; long-distance cycling.

Nursing and patient care

New graduate RN

Interests: volunteer first-aid cover at local road races (6 events a year); sign language study (two community courses completed); hiking.

Charge nurse, 9 years

Interests: coaching a youth swim squad (14 swimmers, two seasons); vegetable gardening; crisis-line volunteering.

Teaching, K–12

First-year teacher

Interests: youth theatre stage crew (3 productions a year); children's book collecting; conversational Spanish practice group.

Department lead, 12 years

Interests: running a neighbourhood free library (stocked and maintained since 2021); amateur astronomy with an 8-inch Dobsonian; marathon running.

Accounting and finance

Staff accountant

Interests: treasurer for a 60-member cycling club (annual budget and dues reconciliation); bridge; fantasy league commissioner (10-team league, 4 seasons).

Controller

Interests: coaching a high-school math team; woodworking (hand-cut joinery); long-distance swimming.

Sales

Sales development representative

Interests: amateur boxing (3 sanctioned bouts); podcast hosting on local small business (28 episodes); five-a-side soccer league.

Account executive, 7 years

Interests: coaching a U12 soccer team (14 players); improv comedy (weekly troupe since 2022); barbecue competition circuit.

Marketing and communications

Marketing assistant

Interests: running a plant-care account (4,200 followers, weekly short-form video); zine design in Figma; thrifting and resale.

Brand manager, 8 years

Interests: food writing for a neighbourhood newsletter (monthly column since 2020); film photography; trail running.

Graphic and product design

Junior designer

Interests: risograph printing (2 self-published zines); 3D modelling in Blender; typography collecting (photo archive of 400+ shopfront signs).

Senior designer, 10 years

Interests: letterpress printing at a shared studio; sketchbook club organiser (monthly, 15–20 attendees); bouldering.

Hospitality and restaurants

Line cook

Interests: sourdough baking (weekly bakes, natural starter since 2021); foraging; Mexican regional cooking study.

Restaurant general manager

Interests: amateur cheesemaking; coaching a youth baseball team (12 players); long-distance motorcycle touring.

Warehouse and logistics

Warehouse associate

Interests: competitive powerlifting (two local meets); model railway layout building (track planning and wiring); recreational basketball league.

Distribution supervisor

Interests: coaching a youth wrestling club (20 athletes); classic truck restoration; organising a neighbourhood tool library (90 items catalogued).

Skilled trades

Apprentice electrician

Interests: guitar amp repair and valve rebuilds; motocross; volunteer build days with a community housing group (6 days a year).

HVAC service technician, 11 years

Interests: restoring small engines; mentoring apprentices at a trade-school open night; bow hunting.

Law and paralegal

Paralegal, 2 years

Interests: competitive debate judging (4 high-school tournaments a year); genealogy research (archival records); rowing.

Litigation paralegal, 10 years

Interests: volunteer court-watch note-taking; bookbinding; long-distance hiking (completed 2 multi-day sections of a national trail).

Data and analytics

Data analyst, entry level

Interests: open data projects (published 3 Tableau dashboards on local transit timing); backgammon; birdwatching with eBird records (180+ species logged).

Senior analyst, 8 years

Interests: running a monthly R user group (12–20 attendees); orienteering; board game design (one self-published print-and-play title).

Customer support

Support representative

Interests: community moderator for a 5,000-member hobby forum; ASL study; distance running.

Support team lead, 6 years

Interests: coaching adult-learner swim lessons (6-week blocks, 8 learners); ceramics; volunteer phone-bank shift work for a food bank.

• No experience. This is where the section earns its keep. With a short work history, hobbies carry the evidence that you turn up, finish things and work with people. Give each item a measure — seasons, events, members, hours a week — so it reads as commitment rather than preference. Consider promoting the strongest activity out of the hobbies line and into its own dated entry under volunteering or activities, with proper bullets: "Coordinated weekly food-bank sorting shifts for 9 volunteers, 2023–present." The Interview Guys cite research that 82% of managers would rather hire someone with volunteering experience, so structured, dated volunteering is usually worth more space than a one-word hobby.
• Career changer. Pick only the hobbies that belong to the field you are moving into, and say what you actually produced. Someone moving from retail into data work lists the published dashboard, not the reading. Someone moving into teaching lists the youth coaching, not the travel. If the activity gave you a tool or a credential, move it into the skills or certifications section instead, where a reader looking for qualifications will find it. Keep the hobbies line to two or three items so it supports the career story instead of diluting it.
• Senior candidates. The more experience you have, the weaker the case for the section. Resume Genius's 2024 hiring trends survey of 625 hiring managers found that 57% of Gen Z managers rate hobbies and interests among the three most important resume sections, and The Interview Guys report Gen Z hiring managers as 36% more likely than other hiring managers to treat hobbies and interests as the most critical part of the resume — so the audience matters, and you rarely know who it is. At senior level, keep the space for leadership scope, board or association membership, publications and awards, which CareerOneStop lists as optional sections in their own right. If you keep a hobbies line, make it one line of two or three items and put it last.