A question to begin with: A client has been practising Asian martial arts for years. What qualities would you spontaneously attribute to him?
Peter Näf
Zurich, June 2026
I associate this with self-control, mental and physical strength, discipline and peacefulness. And that is exactly how I experienced him. Yet he did not want to mention this extracurricular commitment – pursued at a high level – in his CV. He feared that recruiters might see him as aggressive.
Beware of hypotheses
As I described in my article “What you can learn from a professional negotiator for your job application”, I advise my clients not to rack their brains about what recruiters or hiring managers might think of them. Why not? Because our assumptions are usually wrong – sometimes completely so.
Never hide parts of your personality simply because you believe you know what others might think. Many people do not get rejected – they filter themselves out in advance.
Some would also prefer to conceal earlier professional experiences. One client, who had originally worked as a nurse before moving into a completely different field, considered his first profession irrelevant. He felt embarrassed that he had chosen his current path relatively late. Until, in a job interview, a recruiter withdrew a question about resilience, remarking that this was already evident from his CV. What my client regarded as an awkward relic of the past was, for the recruiter, clear proof of his resilience.
You are more than a qualifications profile
Whether hobbies belong in a CV is open to debate. I would personally leave them out – yet I often read them with interest. What matters is not the hobby itself, but what it reveals about you as a person. That said, listing only high-risk extreme sports may raise unnecessary concerns.
Other professions or extracurricular commitments in which people have developed professionally or personally are often a valuable addition to a purely career-based qualifications profile. The same applies to particular life circumstances, such as frequent moves during childhood. In his career classic “Creating You & Co.”, William Bridges describes these as “assets” (see my article “Do you put all your assets on the scale pan?”).
Through such experiences, people acquire the ability to deal with change and to find their feet quickly in new situations. Career breaks or apparent discontinuities are often the most powerful training grounds.
At a time when many applicants present themselves in interchangeable ways, CVs turn into deserts of buzzwords and tools like ChatGPT smooth and standardise everything, you can once again stand out through personality. Recruiters do not hire profiles. They hire people.
Among supposedly perfect but barely distinguishable avatars, it is ultimately the human being – with strengths and rough edges alike – who stands out.