Useful hobbies can land you a dream job

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: If you were looking for a job and came across Kochi-based data marketing firm Ayruz’s advertisement, you might pinch yourself and wonder if it is true.

“Can you name all the French World Cup players in a single breath, then we have a job for you,” reads the advertisement posted by the firm. This ad is an example a new set of jobs that sets aside the usual qualifications sought by the traditional job sector.

Ayruz Data Marketing seeks candidates who have a deeper knowledge of sports for the post of sports analyst. One of its directors Kenny Jacob said the firm was only looking at a person’s knowledge in sports and nothing else.

“The ad just means that the applicants must have good knowledge in sports. This is for our project in sports analytics for our UKbased client DataPowa, a sports and entertainment sponsorship firm. Employees should analyse data that is used to create POWA Index which is a sports sponsorship solution that helps brands to invest in teams, leagues and players,” he said.

The role of the executive thus selected is to identify discrepancies in recorded data like aligning a player to a wrong club or assigning a wrong winner to a league championship. “A die-hard fan can easily spot such errors. Hobbies is one field ignored by our traditional job sector. Now, a good number of jobs also look at a person’s hobbies such as sports. There is little value for degrees,” said Jacob.

One recent job ad posted by Technopark firm FAYA Corporation read: “Not degree certificates or experience. Super heroes are driven by skill and passion! Know such a super hero? Share it! Current openings are for angular JS, UX/UI and python devs.”

Company MD Deepu S Nath said IT are now focussing on a person’s eagerness to adapt than his academic qualification. “People working on artificial intelligence or blockchain never learned it in college. Times have changed where a person could work only as a JAVA or dot net programmer. Can someone say that I am an ambassador driver? He is supposed to drive all cars,” he said.

Now even top IT firms are looking at a candidate’s GitHub (a code collaboration platform) profile to understand his/her coding capabilities and attitude towards learning new things. There are additional platforms like stackoverflow.com to showcase problem solving skills and www.hackerrank.com to showcase endurance and algorithm skills, he added.