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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

This is very dependent on the country / culture.

In Germany, for example, a resume without a photo will most likely not even get considered.

As someone with experience on the hiring side, I occasionally help newbies by providing reviews of their resumes/portfolios. I typically tell them to drop photos because that's the norm here in North America, but if I had to generalize, my advice would be to follow the norms of the country/city where you are applying.

The rationale is simple and pragmatic: employers want to find the gold nuggets, but snowflake resumes scream lack of experience and can easily be filtered out in early stages of the funnel.

Inexperienced people often make these intricate resumes w/ fancy templates, but all that tells me is they're fluffing it up to compensate for lack of content - sometimes in a quest for beauty, they don't even spell out their contact information!

My advice to those people is to go talk to a recruiting agency or a local job board. They can help find and correct all of those faux-pas, catered to the local market expectations.

> they don't even spell out their contact information!

I suffered with 10 years of Indian recruiter spam in my voicemail. They're never getting my phone again.

I've lived in Germany for 7 years and never once have I added a picture to my resume. It's been no trouble in getting interviews and job offers. I work in tech though. So the experience could vary depending on your industry

Why do they require a photo in the resume?

I'm curious about the reason.

They just want to know whom they're dealing with. And I don't think it's such a big deal because once they invite you to an interview, they will know what you look like anyway.

It is a big deal, though. Getting to the interview is the first hurdle.

There have been several variations of a famous study where they sent identical resumes to hundreds of companies, with the single change that there was a stereotypical "white" name vs "Black" name at the top.

The studies consistently find that the "white" names get far more call backs.

Granted, those studies were in the US, but I'd be very surprised if a similar effect did not show up in most European countries.

Always beware 'studies' and 'experts'...

Note that these studies were done with resumes without photos. You don't need a picture to be biased.

Right, exactly. The name alone was enough.

Who says the picture would have the same affect? What if it turns out there's less racial bias when a picture is added?

This is a really good point, one I hadn't throught about. What if the name creates a bias because it conjures up an image that is nothing like the person - while their picture "undoes" that.

Not saying I necessarily believe that happens, but I really appreciate the logic of your point/question.

While it's worth pointing out the limits of our knowledge, I wonder why you appear to think it's just as likely that the photo will eliminate the racial bias? If studies have shown that a black-sounding name means fewer jobs, I would think the default hypothesis, until proven otherwise, would be that a black photo would result in the same ends.

Thinking that it might as well go the other way seems to imply that there's just something weird about names, and that people don't really have racial biases. But this charitable view of the world has been shown false time and again.

In any case, a version of the study with live people, instead of photos, has also been done, and, not surprisingly, shown the same result:

> Other studies have also examined race and employment. In a 2009 study, Devah Pager, Bruce Western and Bart Bonikowski, all now sociologists at Harvard, sent actual people to apply for low-wage jobs. They were given identical résumés and similar interview training. Their sobering finding was that African-American applicants with no criminal record were offered jobs at a rate as low as white applicants who had criminal records.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/upshot/the-measuring-stic...

It’s also not just race but beautiful people, especially with symmetric facial features are subconscious biases that presumably plays a role. I don’t know if there are studies around this, I’d bet there would be a huge bias.

Photos are completely unnecessary and mostly nuisance IMO.

Yep, they did studies in Germany with German sounding names and Turkish sounding names: https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/2010-02/studie-bewerber-aus...

And they can skip your resume if they don't like your looks or skintone.

If that were the case, getting to the interview phase wouldn't provide you much benefit anyway.

True. But sometimes one person looks over resumes and different people, or a couple people, handle the interview itself.

Or your age: https://www.psychnewsdaily.com/older-job-seekers-on-linkedin...

It is a big deal. How you look has absolutely nothing to do with how you’ll perform at a job. Photos only enable discrimination, there really is no other purpose.

You are asking the wrong question. They expect it because it's the norm in Germany. Human is psychology is such that a resume with a photo is just more memorable, so it became the norm because applicants do it. Bias is less of a concern in a country that is historically more homogeneous.

I assume this depends on the role as well? I'm not German (nor do I live there), but if someone told me I'd have to put a picture on my CV for an engineering role, and I'd be very weirded out, especially as a foreigner.

Not in IT, though.

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