Asif Osman presents a short spoken reflection arguing that interviewers should ask candidates about sports participation because sports often develop teamwork, interpersonal skills, competitiveness, and physical/mental strength. He grounds this view in an anecdote about a former boss who asked "what kind of sports do you play?" during interviews and reports that candidates with sports backgrounds tended to perform better in people-facing roles like sales and marketing. The piece concludes with advice for interviewers to consider sports experience and for non-sporting candidates to prepare.
Chapters
Hi, welcome. My name is Asif Usman, and here I am with another thought of mine. This particular thought or viewpoint of mine on this issue sometimes gets me into long and heated conversations with friends and peers and other people in hr because I learned something from a previous boss of mine. And this boss is somebody that I respect very much, a driven leader, and somebody that I learned from a lot. And what I learned from him on this particular aspect is whenever he did interviews of candidates, he would ask a question, what kind of sports do you play? And initially, when I attended interviews with him, I sort of wondered why he would ask this question. Well, how is it relevant to a job that we hire him for? But later on, I realized how relevant it is and how important it is for a person to be playing some sort of sport. And we're not talking about armchair sportsman. And of course, it is debatable as to how much importance sports plays in certain roles. You know, you could be a programmer, not be interested in sports at all, but be a very, very good programmer. But there are certain jobs which require skill sets, and sports plays its own role in developing those skill sets. So people who played sports, and we were interviewing them for jobs like sales executives, sales managers, account managers, marketing executives, and basically jobs which required a lot of interaction with colleagues and customers and vendors and suppliers, etc. We realized that those who played sports had better conceptual understanding of what it means to be a team member. We realized they had better interpersonal skills, and basically sports made them a little bit competitive as well. We found that the ones that we hired that were salespeople who are very much into sports, or rather excelled in sports, also sort of excelled in sales, they would do well in sales because they had that competitive spirit within them. So I sort of tend to believe that sports does have its role in a person's life, and certain sports do make you mentally and physically stronger. So I hold the view that if you're able to interviewing for certain positions do ask the question, you will know a lot more about the candidate. So if you're not into sports, it's something for you to think about and prepare yourself the next time you ask that question.
