The hobbies and interests that a candidate chooses to include on their application can also tell a prospective employer a lot about them. You can use your ‘extra-curricular’ activities to demonstrate the kinds of skills that are important for the motor trade and you can even use hobbies to fill in any gaps in your work experience. In this month’s blog, we’re looking at the kind of pastimes that could help you gain a role as a Sales Executive in the motor industry.

Firstly, we would be looking for people who are sociable and outgoing, so you might mention adventure sports, karaoke, clubs that you take part in or sociable team sports (especially if you’re the team captain, which shows an element of leadership and responsibility too).

Do you enjoy performing in your local am-dram society? Or perhaps you’re involved in a community group or take part in voluntary work for a local charity. All of these could imply that you enjoy delivering great customer service, making people happy.

Attention to detail is quite easy to demonstrate. Perhaps you make videos in your spare time, or models, you paint watercolours or enjoy photography. You might play a musical instrument. These all indicate a finer level of focus and discipline.

Participation in community groups, clubs or the local parish council can help to show that you’re good at managing your own time. If you organised your own wedding, managing all the different suppliers and bringing everything together to make the day run smoothly, then this is a perfect example of excellent time and project management.

Finally, employers are always looking for people with a good level of computer literacy. This can be a tricky one, because some tech hobbies can make you sound rather introverted, so think about how you use a range of technology. Do you use Excel to manage your kids’ cricket club bookings, or perhaps you enjoy blogging about a passion of yours? You might design websites for fun; if you already run a really good website for any of your hobbies, be sure to mention it.

If you can only list ‘reading’ as one of your hobbies, then, firstly, the employer might not be very interested in you as a candidate and secondly, you’re probably not the sort of person who’s going to be excited about car sales anyway. Another one to avoid is the general term, ‘socialising’ as, whilst it’s great that you’re a sociable person, putting this on your CV can imply that your only outside interest is going to the pub!