Ok, rather than take the commuting thread too far off topic, I thought I’d start a new one.
As mentioned earlier, I list my unicycle skills on my CV, as well as juggling, rubiks cube and hot rod driving. These are fairly unusual for a smart suited city manager, but I believe they give me the edge over someone else with the same kind of skills but more mundane interests.
However, there is an argument that you are instantly labelling youself as some kind of freak and would therefore never get to an interview stage.
Luckily, the company I work for is a large recruitment/head hunting consultancy which specialises in the financial, professional and pharmaceutical sectors, so I have taken the chance to ask a cross section of the consultants their opinion on this.
It’ll probably take a couple of days for all the replies to come back to me, but in the mean time, I’m curious to know your views.
Obviously if you’re applying for jobs such as childrens entertainer then including unicycling on your CV is probably compulsory!
I have mountain unicycling on my CV; it was brought up at the interviews for my current and previous jobs in systems and software engineering, both in a positive manner.
At the first, one of the interviewers was a very active person who was intrigued, so the conversation covered my unicycling and biking before moving on to his sailing, which I also have an interest in. We had an excellent rapport by the end when we finally moved on to work related subjects.
In the end that interview lasted about an hour, most of which was nothing to do with work…
It is also a good way in an interview to get a conversation going where the person will open up a bit more and you can get a better feel of how the person is like.
I always put unicycling, juggling, etc on my CV. In my line of work interviewers typically like to see that you have a life outside work and that you have good stress management strategies. They like to see you having interesting hobbies. It also gives interviewers something to ask me if I’m babbling incoherently and obviously too nervous to answer any proper questions.
I even used learning to unicycle to illustrate an answer to a question in my last interview. The interviewer was very impressed and said I had very good ‘joined up thinking’, whatever that may be.
