Answering “What Are You Passionate About?” in This Year

>There are plenty of job interview questions that are complicated and difficult to answer. The interview question “what are you passionate about?” seems misleadingly simple at first – after all, if you know you’re passionate, you should be able to answer this question, right? As with all interview questions, however, there’s an underlying meaning to this question that can make it more difficult to find a good answer.

Here’s what you need to know about coming up with a great answer to this interview question.

>The first thing to learn is why recruiters ask this question in general. This can help you construct an effective answer.

A hiring manager is partially asking you this question to learn more about you on a personal level and to see what you’re like in your personal life. While it’s true that this isn’t the only reason, they do want to know a bit about who you are and what you enjoy. People’s lives impact how they perform at a job.

One of the biggest reasons that recruiters ask this question is to see what you’re like when you’re comfortable. When you’re talking about your true passion, you’re going to behave a little differently than you might in the rest of the interview. This question gives the interviewer an opportunity to see how you’ll behave in a more “normalized” context, which is mostly how you’ll be at the actual job.

Recruiters may also ask this to see if you’re a good culture fit with the company. The company culture at every location will be different, and, if you don’t fit in well, it might impact your ability to fit in with the team. A potential employer wants to know that you’re passionate about the same kinds of things that the rest of the company is.

An effective answer to this question showcases your personal passion in a way that connects to elements of the job at hand. You want to talk about a true passion, but you should do it in a way that showcases soft skills, self-improvement, and the type of job you’re looking for. Here are some example answers that you might use for different jobs.

• Career Coach: “I’m passionate about health and fitness. I love helping people get their careers on the right track, and I think caring about my own well-being naturally connects to that.
• Software Developer: “My personal passion is analyzing film. I really love seeing how pieces of a puzzle fit together – seeing how one shot in a specific movie compares with a similar shot in another movie is really interesting to me.”
• Customer Service Representative: “I really love doing art. Customer service can be stressful from time to time; art has always helped me with work-related stress, so I can be on top of my game every day. It’s one of the things that’s always kept me going.”

Note that in all of these example answers, the answer connects to the new job in some way, but it’s also truthful.

Knowing how to pick out essentially the same question in different wordings can help streamline your interview answers. A recruiter may use any of these questions to ask essentially the same question:

• What do you do in your free time?
• What do you love to do?
• What are some of the things you’re most passionate about?
• Do you have a passion that drives you?
• Do you have any hobbies?
• What is your biggest passion?
• What makes you unique?
• What are your personal interests?
• Tell me about yourself.

In all of these situations, you should use the same approach as outlined above. Find something you’re passionate about, talk about why it’s important to you, and connect it to the job.