About 9 interviews later over 4 spread-out days, I was told I had done quite well during the interview process.
Eventually I was not given the position because I was holding a beer in my LinkedIn picture.
They ended up paying my current employer (their vendor at the time) astronomical amounts of money to do the very same service, done by me, on-site.
Go figure.
If they don't want my whole personality, they can't have my intelligence.
I refuse to turn myself into a "corporate robot" for the sake of a paycheck.
They only grep the CVs for words, if you put you're a lion tamer, archeologist, but has the word PHP in your CV (or something similar) you'll get a flood of IT jobs
My personality is my personality, and when you hire me you're going to get the whole thing. If you can't handle it, I rather you don't even talk to me in the first place.
I look forward to a future where nobody cares about this stuff.
My contact at the client gathered up all the photos and bios and emailed them to me. Maybe 25% of the photos were professional headshots. The majority were just crappy cell phone pictures.
The rest were people at parties holding a beer. I emailed my contact to make sure he wanted me to use these and he told me to go ahead. Sure enough, a day after we went live I get a pissed-off call from him demanding to know why I used those photos.
As with all interviews, you gotta do a little dance to get in, but they're not reflective of daily experience.
On the bright side, this is one of the things that stops the entire economy being swallowed up by a handful of megacorporations.