How Hobbies Can Make You Land Your Dream Job

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Friends, I have great news. I found a contract job for the next 18-months, and I am pretty excited about it. I am going back to corporate America, but the settings of this job are going to allow me to have a work-life balance!

Let me tell you a bit about it. First of all, I will work from home, meaning that I won’t spend hours stuck in traffic every day! If you read my article about the myth of waking up early to be successful, you know that one of the big reason I was having a hard time was to start the day stuck in traffic for more than an hour and then having to do the same in the evening.

But what I love the most about it, is that I am going to be working with books! You know how much I love books, I often talk about it 🙂

Now let me tell you how my hobbies, helped me find jobs since I moved to the USA and started my career in the tech industry with contracts at Google and Microsoft.

Volunteering

When I first came to Seattle, I was doing a 6-month internship for my Bachelor in International Business. One of my good friends was also working in the Emerald City.

While I was working for a French Boutique, my friend was interning at the French American Chamber of Commerce, and I ended up helping with a few projects. So got to meet her team and stayed in contact with them when I had to go back to France at the end of my internship.

But during my time in Seattle I met my husband, and since we wanted to stay together and I graduated from college when I went back home, we decided that I would try to come back and find a job.

You have to understand that finding a job when you don’t have a visa is hard. I first got a one-year internship in Florida, and after a few complications that I mention in this article I ended up flying back to Seattle with only a month to find an internship or go back to France.

So I reconnected with the people I met the year before and one of my friends at the FACC told me that I should attend the networking event the next week to meet people.

During the networking, my friend introduced me to the sales director of the hotel hosting the event and told him:

“Richard, you should hire Julie!”

And guess what, it turned out that the following week they needed a new sales coordinator and I got the job just in time before the deadline for my visa!

Volunteering will give meaning to your life while networking with people and create unexpected opportunities!

Technical hobbies

When I was fifteen years old, I learned how to create websites. It was more than fifteen years ago so at the time you had to know how to code a site.

Since then, I’ve always had websites. I love creating new ones so when I was looking for an internship to come back to Seattle in 2011, I decided to create a site for my résumé and a blog to show that even if I was French, I could speak and write in English. My blog at the time was about trips with my family and events I attended in Paris.

This hobby helped me learned languages like HTML, CSS, PHP, …  and put me into situations where I had to solve problems by myself.

During my internship at the hotel, I got married to my boyfriend and got my green card. The day after receiving the green card which allowed me to work for any company in the USA, I was contacted by three agencies for a contract job on the app store at Microsoft. The team was looking for a French marketing person to take care of the merchandising for the French and Canadian stores.

There are a lot of French people in Seattle, but I believe that what separated me from other marketing candidates was my computer skills which in the end helped me understand how apps are built and ask the right questions during the interview.

And so my journey into the tech industry began 🙂 Which honestly I would have never thought would happen.

Creative hobbies

Now let’s talk about this new opportunity that came up last week.

My friend’s contract is ending this week. She manages the Microsoft bookstore, and she knows that I read a lot. Plus, she told me that I would love working with her manager. So she gave my resume to her manager who happened to know my last manager from two years ago before I moved to Google.

After talking with my previous manager, we exchanged a couple of emails, and I linked the article to this summer reading list to find purpose because I wanted to convey my love for reading.

During the interview, we talked about my technical skills for the job first of course, but then we spent a bit of time chatting about books 🙂

So I am excited about this opportunity. And if you like my book recommendations on the blog and want more, you will be able to find them on the Microsoft bookstore!

How Hobbies Can Make You Land Your Dream Job

I think that having hobbies is important for your personal development. They help you have fun, learn new skills and meet new people.

When it comes to job search, having a hobby can help you differentiate yourself from other candidates by adding skills to your resume but also connect with the hiring manager.

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Further reading

• 12 Hobbies That Will Reduce Your Anxiety And Make You Feel Fulfilled
• 10 Reasons Why You Need A Hobby To Improve Your Life
• How To Make A Good First Impression With An Elevator Speech
• New Habits That Will Make You Happier
• The Myth of Waking Up Early to be Successful

Over to you

What are your hobbies?