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Comment by RLN | Hacker News Reader

Very striking for me is listing of height, health and birth date. I would never put these on a CV. All irrelevant.

Look at current secretary job postings in China. Even if you can't read Chinese, you can see the measurement requirements in centimeters. Yes, those measurements (bust, waist, hip).

Here's an indeed.com search for "cm" that pulls them up: https://cn.indeed.com/jobs?q=cm

All the results in that link are height requirements.

You don't need to be able to read Chinese to know that a 160cm bust size requirement is implausible...

CVs here in France not only typically include date of birth but also a photo and marital status, too. None of this is relevant to the job search but it's how things are done.

They don't need to. It's a bad habit from some old folks and some teachers poorly telling students how to do a resume.

You're right, yet almost every CV I see has a photo and DOB, and a good majority have marital status. Adding the number of children is less common, though, but all of it is irrelevant to any job I would be hiring for.

I did some training with the Equality Commission in Northern Ireland some time ago, and since then I've been actively ignoring anything that people put on their CVs that is not relevant to the position they have applied for. Aside from experience and education background, additional information should be limited to facts that are relevant to the position (e.g. do you need a work permit, can you speak the same language as the rest of the team)

I wish people would stop including the information as then it takes away the risk that they can't later claim that they didn't get the job because of their age, sex, martial status, etc.

They have some guidance on how to encourage equal opportunities in the job application process [0], the monitoring questions here [1] should be seen as things that should not be asked in a standard application process, nor included in a CV.

There's many attributes that we can't legally discriminate against when someone applies for a position [2]. We might be a little more aware of trying to ensure the process is fair and balanced, and it's certainly quite different from other parts of the UK and Europe.

[0] https://www.equalityni.org/ECNI/media/ECNI/Publications/Empl...

[1] https://www.equalityni.org/Employers-Service-Providers/Small...

[2] https://www.nibusinessinfo.co.uk/content/equality-law-and-ty...

*edit - fixed formatting of references

I am surprised that the EU hasn't clamped down on photos etc on cv's as it's obvious way for employers to discriminate on race.

Names are also a way to discriminate on ethnicity, although they're less reliable: names can be changed. Discrimination occurs in all manner of ways. In many countries, more casual labour the screening is done by a face-to-face interview. Clamping down on photos on a CV is not going to do much in those cases.

In the UK it seems it's perfectly alright to have a farm owner appear on a TV news station and be completely unchallenged as she is almost boastful about how she discards applications from one EU country's workers because another EU's countries workers are better and don't complain as much.

This is prima facie the very thing that equality legislation is there to prevent -- generalizations being applied to individuals based upon something beyond their control, such as nationality of birth.

If you found a way to survey small employers in a way they felt comfortable about answering truthfully, they will have notions about many nationalities. Some will be generalizations that on average apply poorly to the individual, some will apply better. Almost all will be based on a ridiculously unrepresentative sample size that is likely heavily biased towards a particular segment of the population. This is in spite of some of the most advanced equality legislation in the world.

The tech industry has some pretty poor generalizations about the work produced by certain nationalities.

For many employers equality starts and ends with an equal opportunities monitoring form stapled to the back of an application form that the applicant is to complete for a job that they already have no chance of getting. Even getting rid of names, education, past jobs and on CVs and application forms is not going to change that.

I was talking about "professional" well paid jobs in particular casual labourers don't have CV's

This is HN I suspect that no one on here is "casual labour"

The Europass CV lists various personal information for inclusion, including address, date of birth and sex. The online editor[0] mentions that all fields are optional, and some of them are listed under extra fields, but before the online editor, these templates circulated only as Word documents for about a decade, with less nuanced instructions.

It was implied that you had to fill out the template properly, including adding a photo, and as a result we were sending unnecessary personal information to all companies we applied to.

[0] https://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/editors/en/cv/compose

I'm recruiting for an outsourced team in Portugal at the moment. They include photos on their CVs. Date of birth and marital status is pretty much standard in Norway as well.

I think that's mainly because of past conventions, and the lack of sharing current expectations. A company could refer to Europass in their job description, and also offer a filled out CV template that only lists personal information that is expected to be shared. Or are CVs which do not include photos still considered incomplete or less desirable by the recruiters you know?

You should only put a picture if you have a very good looking photo specifically for this purpose and if you are in a customer facing role. Otherwise it's likely to do more harm than good.

I've noticed the same trend as well. Different parts of Europe & South America its fairly common to include a photo of yourself on the topleft corner

No European has ever used an Europass CV to apply to a job.

At least one did. Source: interviewed him.

I see that some grad schools in Europe want a Europass CV. Is this more or less what it is meant for, or are there other niche use-cases?

In his position at Convair, he lists "Flight Test Engineer" as one of his roles. If he performed these duties onboard an aircraft (as many FTEs do), these could be relevant parameters. If he listed them for that reason, he probably just left them there in 1980 out of tradition (see docdeek's comment).

The 1980s weren't all that long after they stopped requiring you to include a picture with a job application.

At one time it wasn't illegal to discriminate based on health/disability, so it made sense to advertise yourself as healthy, as you'd take less sick days, etc.

It is not illegal to declare you are advantageous in particular skill.

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