Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

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I worked in business consulting and we always put resumes/bios with out pictures (professional headshots) in proposals.

Many startups have founder / leadership pics and bios on their website

Most "professionals" like lawyers have a headshot on their website. Every political campaign features the face of the candidates.

Almost everyone who uses linkedin has a pic

Really, western institutional job applications are pretty much the only place where people are trying to "sell themselves" but don't have a pic. It's basically fairness theatre, to pretend that the personal physical characteristics of people don't matter. If that was true, you wouldn't have all the examples I listed.

I'm not trying to say it's right or wrong here, just that it's obvious from all human behavior that seeing what a person looks like is an important part of working with them.

> I'm not trying to say it's right or wrong here, just that it's obvious from all human behavior that seeing what a person looks like is an important part of working with them.

You will see it during the actual interview stage (whether it is done through a videocall or in-person), why would you need it during the resume stage? So you can use a single photo of theirs as a factor when deciding whether to filter out a resume or to proceed further?

I agree it factors in highly in the US. Probably incorrectly so. But here the perceived threat of lawsuits and equal employment opportunity scrutiny drive the practice of leaving out the headshot. Let people discriminate when they have more plausible deniability, I suppose. Even though unattractive is not a protected class, receiving headshots of the applicants to be rejected before interview would open you to scrutiny of differentials in hiring of protected classes as well.

> seeing what a person looks like is an important part of working with them

Why?

Because we're social animals that have evolved to weight appearance very highly in decision we make. I'm not trying to justify it, but it's a fact. We're not vulcans, and even if we we're we'd recognize that what we find attractive has evolutionary significance and weigh that signal accordingly.

Unsurprisingly, there are no unattractive Vulcans, at least none I've met.

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