> Data were collected from 229 participants working in a management position in the United States through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants were compensated at a rate equivalent to $7 per hour.
I have a hard time imagining people in "management positions" working on Mechanical Turk for less than (US) minimum wage.
If I understand correctly, participants also didn't rate applications with photos, but just photos. Seems possible and perhaps likely that the pragmatics of this specific task would activate biases that may not be at play (or to a lesser degree) in an actual application process where the photo would be just one piece of information. The task really seems designed to maximize effects of beautification while sacrificing generalizability to real-world settings.