Bad things don't always come from malice.
Often even education is no longer a useful signal. I've found myself looking away from educational information on resumes for all but the most junior of applicants. A candidate with even a couple of years of experience is lightyears removed from the school that has granted their degree. Likewise, a person with a similar number of years on the job but lacking a degree is similarly removed from their humble beginnings. There's no need to flaunt education.
In that sense, he's right: that system works for both sides.
Technical skills, attitude, work ethic, communication skills, and professionalism are really all you need to work with your colleagues successfully. Hobbies, pet preference, and exercise preference is irrelevant.
How about a love of dance or photography?
We go to work to get paid for our skills, not to go camping together or share our love of bird watching.
What if a hobby included volunteering at a church, mosque, local GOP or DNC fundraising HQ, re-enacting War simulations or practicing at a gun range?
I agree with the posters above who think this is, at best, useless and at worst, a potential for discrimination.
I can imagine tech jobs where most of the hobbies you've listed could be considered relevant. Dance? Biometric sensor tech. Guns? Video games. And so on...
>We go to work to get paid for our skills, not to go camping together or share our love of bird watching.
Some people prefer to work on teams where they're treated more like humans and less like cogs in a machine.
If you hire chess players based on individual performance and regardless of group dynamics, then an argument could be made (not entirely trivially in all cases but it could be) that looking at anything except their ELO is illegitimate bias (and in fact some famous players from Lasker to Korchnoi said themselves that it's this objectivity which attracted them to chess). With programming, or most professions involving something meaningful as opposed to a measurable but pointless (and usually measurable because it is pointless) activity aka sport, it's much murkier.