July 30, 2025 · View in browser

The Insightful Leader

BY KELLOGG INSIGHT

Leadership advice from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University

Good morning,

“What do you do in your spare time?”

It’s an interview question that serves as both an icebreaker and a soft datapoint to help generate a more three-dimensional picture of the person you could soon call a colleague.

But could this seemingly innocent conversation also amplify preexisting biases for—and against—people from certain backgrounds?

This week, we explore the research of Kellogg’s Lauren Rivera on how hobbies and sports factor into the hiring process. Plus, how Google’s AI push is affecting the quality of clicks.

An extracurricular Rorschach test

“Interviews can be a somewhat awkward interaction,” Rivera tells HuffPost. “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?’”

Rivera likens this question to “a Rorschach test” you could use to justify any decision about a person.

In a 2011 study, she found that top-tier firms that asked about extracurriculars were more impressed by interviewees who responded with certain high-status, resource-intensive hobbies over extracurriculars that “anyone could do.” Summiting Mount Everest or Mount Kilimanjaro was favored over regular hiking, and “having traveled the globe with a world-renowned orchestra” was preferred over “playing with a school chamber group,” for example.

Overall, firms preferred people with interests that resonated with white, upper-middle class culture, according to the study.

To avoid this bias, Rivera suggests skipping this question altogether. Instead, the interviewer could start by saying something like “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 move right to the structured part of this.”

Fair or unfair, firms will still ask the question, but job seekers can still stick the landing with some preparation. Consider an answer that will lead to an engaging conversation with the interviewer about how your values align with the role and the organization.

“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 says.

A preference for sports

More recent research by Rivera confirmed that these biases extend beyond the United States.

In a study of Norwegian firms in high-status industries, Rivera and Lisa Sølvberg, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Bergen, found that sports came up over and over in candidate evaluations.

The researchers focused on hiring patterns at “elite,” or very selective, firms. They noticed a strong focus on athletics in the hiring process at financial, accounting, law, and medical organizations. The clear exceptions were elite firms in publishing and the arts.

Why did some employers care so much about a background in sports, even when it had nothing to do with the candidates’ job responsibilities?

Some evaluators saw athletics as a marker of valuable traits, such as good time management, ambition, determination, and the ability to work in teams (even if the person had only played an individual sport). In contrast, the lack of a sports background was sometimes seen as a sign of sloth.

Yet other personal activities that could signal positive character traits weren’t given the same weight. For instance, parenting or working while attending university, which could also indicate good time management, were not valued.

Firms that want to rely on proxies should “thoroughly vet the ones they use to make sure that they are not systematically excluding a large portion of the population,” Rivera says. “Athletes do not have a monopoly on time management and teamwork.”