When I was in England for a short time I was tasked with screening candidates for employment (software engineers). As an American, I was taken aback by most of the resumes including photos. That's just not done here in the US. Some American HR departments might even send back your resume and ask you to resubmit it without a photo. It seems to be standard practice in Europe, perhaps to convince you that the person interviewing is the person associated with the resume.
Of course, attractiveness factors in highly once you get your foot in the door, even if people try to act like it doesn't. Even straight male engineers seem to think more highly of attractive male engineers, just because of the "coolness" factor they may bring. There's really just not a lot of information gleaned from an interview beyond whether the person has the basic minimum knowledge for the field they are in, and these soft things take an outsize portion of the score.
Things may be changing or may be different in big orgs, I don't know. I was only familiar with SME hiring.
There's a lot of data out there showing that attractiveness, fitness (as in, not obese), and tallness are all massive biases in the workplace -- much bigger in many studies than biases around gender and ethnicity even.
I don't know why these forms of identity are almost entirely ignored, while we obsess over others.
Imagine if tech companies published the height, weight, and facial symmetry of their workforces, like they do now with race and gender.
I've always been amazed at the hypocrisy of all of this. A portion of attractiveness is culture-invariant, and quantifiable based on measurable factors such as facial symmetry. Study after study have demonstrated that humans innately treat attractive individuals better than others.
Yet we obsess over skin colour and genitalia, without a single peep about the physical appearance discrimination that most humans take part in.
Putting physical fitness in the same bucket as height, gender, and race is a category error. Whether someone is fit or obese tells you a lot about their lifestyle and daily choices. You cannot change your facial structure or tallness (yet), but fitness is definitely a signal for discipline and mental strength.
>There's a lot of data out there showing that attractiveness, fitness (as in, not obese), and tallness are all massive biases in the workplace -- much bigger in many studies than biases around gender and ethnicity even.
Not only are they biases, there is some data that shows attractiveness, height, etc actually correlate with competency. It might be a true stereotype (self-fulfilling or not).
I've wondered if much of the gender discrimination in the workplace can be attributed to height discrimination, as women tend to he shorter. Is there data on how men and women fare adjusted for height?
(This is obviously separate from any sexual harassment etc in the workplace -- I'm referring to compensation and promotions)
At my company we joke about how many of us hired during covid are really short. Remote hiring seems to have been a great leveller, at least on that one front.
The reason they are "obsessed over", or taken into account as someone else may put it, although I'll give you that any kind of social/cultural identity tends to lead to some form of obsession in some people's minds, is because they are deemed significant for locally dependent social/historical/political reasons which I am sure I don't need to give you examples of but will anyway : colonialism, slavery, genocides... You name it
Whereas discrimination exist based of height, weight, and facial symmetry, because they are a little less based on cultural factors, they tend to cross group boundaries and not allow for culture wars because of its more evenly distributed nature.
The interesting thing is that the fact that you took the time to write a comment about them and that they are becoming a social issue is because the culture spheres tend to be bigger and more intertwined with globalization. People who share the same issues can find eachother and aggregate across cultural identities. The incel "movement" is a product of the world wide web, I don't think it would have been possible in another era.
On another hand, I don't think we need to establish hierarchies between discriminations. Although discriminations share a lot of their logic, they also often respond to their own logic. I am all in favor to put in place more mechanisms to avoid it, like any kind of anonymization, but I don't they are an argument against what's already put in place against more socially recognized ones.
I am living in a country where photos on a resume are the norm and for me it is the other way round. I am interviewing a lot of people at the moment and having a picture with the resume really helps thinking of the applicant as a human being, rather than just a character sheet with skills and abilities. It also helps to remember and associate resumes, it's easier to relate a portrait to a set of skills and a CV than tens of names. You don't have to be a super model, just any professional picture will do that.
It's also an illusion that not having pictures on the resume will reduce Bias in favor of attractive people. It will only push it to a later stage of the interview process.
I think most less attractive people would rather get to the later stages of the interview process where they'll get a chance to advocate for themselves. It's better than being screened out early and not knowing whether it's because you're ugly or because the qualifications listed in your resume aren't impressive.
Honestly I'm surprised it's acceptable for resumes presented to me as a hiring manager to even have names on them, let alone photos. Humans are hardwired to make snap judgements about people based on a first visual impression, and a photo at the top of a resume will massively color the rest of your assessment.
That is extremely unusual for the UK. I know some European countries make a photo mandatory - but I've never seen it in the UK.
I've reviewed a huge number of CVs - at SME and large companies. I think the only time I've ever seen a photo in that context was an auto-generated thing from LinkedIn.
Eh, I see a few photos on CVs here in the UK - typically on Euro candidates though (from memory).
On the other hand I've seen all sorts of weird shit on CVs, it is part of the fun. From the guy giving himself 5/5 stars for inter-personal skills, to the obscure hobbies expanded on in great detail, to the hilarious email addresses.
There is just a wide range of views on what a cv should contain. My views doubtless differ to others! I did give a yes to the guy with the .txt file cv though. On principle.
As far as I know, it's very unusual in Netherland. I've certainly never included a photo on a CV (though I do have one on LinkedIn, where a lot of my work comes from). When I was part of the hiring process, I did notice that all Indian/TCS CVs I got to see had photos, though.
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.
I’ve been a hiring manager in England for around 10 years and I can’t recall a single CV with a photo. I don’t know where these CVs were coming from that you received but it’s definitely not standard practice to send a CV with a photo here.
I've been working as a programmer in the UK for ~20 years. I've interviewed a huge number of job candidates in that time and reviewed more CVs than I'd care to count. I have never seen a single CV with a photo on it.
Entirely possible they're filtered out by recruiters and/or HR, of course.
It’s not a UK cultural thing - never in my life or any friends who I asked have attached a photo - but it’s often done by applicants who might be UK residents when it’s considered the norm in their country of origin.
Personally I hate it, as I know subconsciously having seen their photo, I _will_ use it as part of my evaluation which is unfair to other candidates.
What you describe is what I would consider a cultural thing.
Here in Germany everybody attaches a photo (often a business-like studio photo), for instance.
I've worked in tech in the UK for 25 years now, in companies ranging from tiny startups to SMEs to large corporations, and I've reviewed probably a few thousand CVs in that time. I can't remember ever seeing one with a photo on it. I suspect your experience was influenced by something other than location.
In NZ/AU we don’t include photos or personal information. When I moved to Singapore I was stocked. People put photos. Birthday. Family. Current Salary. Address. Long cover letters.
To be fair, they at least said “seems to be,” which is a bit better than many Europeans who say similar things about Europe on this site, which I find even less excusable and seem to see daily.
On topic, it is quite common in a few other European countries, such as Switzerland and I believe Germany, so I imagine it’s at least much more common in Europe overall given that it’s relatively unheard of in the US.
With or without, tons of companies will do "due diligence" and will look for your FB and Insta feeds, just in case you are drunk or drugged or whatever might seem inappropriate. Kinda creepy to go such lengths, but also some companies don't want people not smart enough to not post their shenanigans publicly.
How do they ensure they are not looking at someone else with the same name ? Not hiring you because you are drunk on Facebook is one thing but not hiring you because someone with the same name is drunk on Facebook is completely ridiculous.
They don't even have to troll your social media accounts, your application has all the info they need to buy details from a data broker/"consumer reputation service"
That’s an interesting practice… I’m glad this is not the case in the states, aside from maybe applying for acting roles. I don’t know if it’s common practice nowadays but I remember there was a period of time when employers would request your social media profiles.. did they encourage something similar in England? Im asking because if they already encouraged photo submissions, this seems like a related piece of information they might have also liked to receive. To be honest I don’t know why they would want an SWE candidates photo in the first place, it’s not a PR heavy role… maybe they want to use A.I to measure a level of greasiness or the size of a candidates head (kidding!)
What about face-to-face or Zoom interviews? At some point you're going have to show your face. LinkedIn has also changed things a lot. It seems like a losing battle, in spite of the good intentions.
Not sure how long ago this was - photos on resumes is definitely not a thing in the UK anymore. Very common in some European countries (e.g. Germany), though.
I'm in my 50s in the UK and I've never had anyone ask for a photo during recruitment and I've also done a lot of hiring for multiple companies and they certainly didn't ask for photos.
Heard from friends who lived and worked in South Korea that it was pretty much mandatory for any resume application there. The specific one that comes to mind is nursing. Definitely left me baffled the first time I heard it.
As others have pointed out, even without photos on resumes, often times the first thing I do when looking at a candidate is go to their LinkedIn profile, which of course do feature headshots.
> 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.
And there it is, the one thing I can never have an honest conversation about. The rules are different for ugly people, based on my personal experience as one data point. We're the last lot that everyone can discriminate against, or abuse, and get away with it.
Heartbreaking to be discriminated against as a result of largely immutable characteristics but there are other groups abused with impunity as well. For example, unintelligent people who are not obviously disabled. Or people with speech defects that are not readily considered disabilities. Even people with acne, rosacea, or eczema -- which is a medical issue and protected to some extent.
Discriminating by age isn't always unreasonable. It's useful to have different generational perspectives in many areas. For example, I think it's a serious issue that the average age of public servants in Congress is so advanced.
The older generations are responsible for training and passing the torch onto the younger generations. The older generation can't keep clinging onto power until they die off.
>Both male and female applicants whose photos were filtered were perceived as more competent
A tale as old as time. Politicians who are attractive have a huge perception advantage. And political campaigns that use actors (who are almost by definition attractive) appeal to these same competence biases.
In the cartoon show Invader Zim, the alien civilization uses height (and only height) to select its leaders. The older I get, the more I wonder if this was satirical.
Being incumbent might be more advantageous than being attractive. You would have to test non incumbent more attractive vs non incumbent less attractive.
> In study 2, beautifying filters increased the hireability only slightly for White female applicants, followed by White and Black male applicants but substantially for Black female applicants
It's a gross thing to consider but I wonder if the filter lightened the skin of black female applicants. These results are disappointing but unfortunately not surprising.
I remember stumbling across a "beauty rating" site that had an ML model trained to rate photos on beauty.
At the risk of sounding conceited, when it gave me (black male) a bad score, I knew something had to be wrong. I went and searched for photos of famous black males generally accepted as attractive and noticed it also gave them poor scores.
That gave me a hunch about what was going on, and lo and behold: taking the same exact photos, but processed to black and white and brightened, resulted in extremely high scores.
The model was essentially measuring how light your skin is.
There are some studies I believe that show even attractive african american women can have trouble with low click through / match / rating on dating sites.
So if the model was trained on who folks wanted to date (as a measure of attractiveness) the model could still be somewhat accurate, even though not accurately measuring attractiveness.
How would models work on rating who would be a good NBA player / runner etc. I wonder if just being white would get me downrated.
That shit is just some dude who put an ImageNet based model on the Internet. I remember going through one of these and getting “First time offender”. I was wearing an orange shirt. That’s a horrendous choice of colour, honestly, but I’ve never been actually caught for any of my crimes and it’s been a while since I committed them first.
The filter in question, FaceApp "Hollywood" absolutely lightens darker skin tones. It moves everything a little more toward "Warm" colors. It also seems to make noses more slender but leaves lips large or enlarges them. That's my unscientific extrapolation from a few samples I saw.
Generally, European colonizers imported their anti-dark skin biases (colourism) to their African colonies and they persist to this day among the black populations.
Apparently still an issue. When two friends of mine, a black woman and a white man, got married, they had to find a specific photographer who specialized in simultaneously photographing black and white people.
Attractiveness is definitely a factor which subconsciously influences Hiring. Fair or Unfair that is life and we have to deal with it.
I have heard that Google tries to control for this by having one panel of people as the Interviewers (i.e. actually meet/talk to the Interviewee) who then write-up their respective reports. This set of reports are then submitted to another panel (who have NOT met/talked to the Interviewee) who then have to make a hiring decision based solely on the reports.
Won't the bias still be present in the report? For example if a candidate left a good impression on me I'll definitely make sure that the report captures that. Not because I'm a bad actor but because I don't know any better, I don't realize my good impression is biased.
At that point the panel makes the call based on a biased report and it thinks the decision is unbiased which is not true.
The bias can be made negligent by mandating a certain format to the report (some Google insider has to provide this detail) and due to the fact that multiple such reports go into the decision-making.
As an example no words which might create a impression but sticking to facts. The inference is left to the second panel. For example instead of saying the candidate thought hard about the given problem say something like the candidate tried out 3 different solutions to the problem over the interview time period. The first panel are merely conveyors of Data; so their reports have to be detailed and to the point.
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Of course, attractiveness factors in highly once you get your foot in the door, even if people try to act like it doesn't. Even straight male engineers seem to think more highly of attractive male engineers, just because of the "coolness" factor they may bring. There's really just not a lot of information gleaned from an interview beyond whether the person has the basic minimum knowledge for the field they are in, and these soft things take an outsize portion of the score.
Things may be changing or may be different in big orgs, I don't know. I was only familiar with SME hiring.
I don't know why these forms of identity are almost entirely ignored, while we obsess over others.
Imagine if tech companies published the height, weight, and facial symmetry of their workforces, like they do now with race and gender.
Yet we obsess over skin colour and genitalia, without a single peep about the physical appearance discrimination that most humans take part in.
Not only are they biases, there is some data that shows attractiveness, height, etc actually correlate with competency. It might be a true stereotype (self-fulfilling or not).
(This is obviously separate from any sexual harassment etc in the workplace -- I'm referring to compensation and promotions)
Deleted Comment
Whereas discrimination exist based of height, weight, and facial symmetry, because they are a little less based on cultural factors, they tend to cross group boundaries and not allow for culture wars because of its more evenly distributed nature. The interesting thing is that the fact that you took the time to write a comment about them and that they are becoming a social issue is because the culture spheres tend to be bigger and more intertwined with globalization. People who share the same issues can find eachother and aggregate across cultural identities. The incel "movement" is a product of the world wide web, I don't think it would have been possible in another era.
On another hand, I don't think we need to establish hierarchies between discriminations. Although discriminations share a lot of their logic, they also often respond to their own logic. I am all in favor to put in place more mechanisms to avoid it, like any kind of anonymization, but I don't they are an argument against what's already put in place against more socially recognized ones.
It's also an illusion that not having pictures on the resume will reduce Bias in favor of attractive people. It will only push it to a later stage of the interview process.
Isn't this preferable though, when there's hopefully other, more meaningful, evidence that can potentially mitigate these easy but weaker biases?
I've reviewed a huge number of CVs - at SME and large companies. I think the only time I've ever seen a photo in that context was an auto-generated thing from LinkedIn.
On the other hand I've seen all sorts of weird shit on CVs, it is part of the fun. From the guy giving himself 5/5 stars for inter-personal skills, to the obscure hobbies expanded on in great detail, to the hilarious email addresses.
There is just a wide range of views on what a cv should contain. My views doubtless differ to others! I did give a yes to the guy with the .txt file cv though. On principle.
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.
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?
Why?
Very unusual practice for the UK, and slightly dubious, IMO.
Entirely possible they're filtered out by recruiters and/or HR, of course.
Personally I hate it, as I know subconsciously having seen their photo, I _will_ use it as part of my evaluation which is unfair to other candidates.
Dead Comment
It's definitely not standard practice to include a photo with a CV in the UK to my knowledge.
Anecdotally I've never done that at any point in my career nor have I ever been asked to.
I've also never seen a photo included with a CV when hiring.
On topic, it is quite common in a few other European countries, such as Switzerland and I believe Germany, so I imagine it’s at least much more common in Europe overall given that it’s relatively unheard of in the US.
This does not match my experience in London working for SMEs, it's very rare that a CV includes a photo, especially tech role applicants.
Deleted Comment
Agree it's pretty uncommon though.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/so-sue-me/201408/do-...
I'm in my 50s in the UK and I've never had anyone ask for a photo during recruitment and I've also done a lot of hiring for multiple companies and they certainly didn't ask for photos.
Deleted Comment
You even get to pick your own image for your driver's license, again with a healthy serving of digital retouching.
> 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.
Dead Comment
With many sick people, it's also impossible not to discriminate (although that also correlates heavily to getting old).
The older generations are responsible for training and passing the torch onto the younger generations. The older generation can't keep clinging onto power until they die off.
A tale as old as time. Politicians who are attractive have a huge perception advantage. And political campaigns that use actors (who are almost by definition attractive) appeal to these same competence biases.
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1346512327353491461...
It's a gross thing to consider but I wonder if the filter lightened the skin of black female applicants. These results are disappointing but unfortunately not surprising.
At the risk of sounding conceited, when it gave me (black male) a bad score, I knew something had to be wrong. I went and searched for photos of famous black males generally accepted as attractive and noticed it also gave them poor scores.
That gave me a hunch about what was going on, and lo and behold: taking the same exact photos, but processed to black and white and brightened, resulted in extremely high scores.
The model was essentially measuring how light your skin is.
So if the model was trained on who folks wanted to date (as a measure of attractiveness) the model could still be somewhat accurate, even though not accurately measuring attractiveness.
How would models work on rating who would be a good NBA player / runner etc. I wonder if just being white would get me downrated.
https://www.e-ir.info/2020/04/11/critical-reflections-on-eth...
Apparently still an issue. When two friends of mine, a black woman and a white man, got married, they had to find a specific photographer who specialized in simultaneously photographing black and white people.
I have heard that Google tries to control for this by having one panel of people as the Interviewers (i.e. actually meet/talk to the Interviewee) who then write-up their respective reports. This set of reports are then submitted to another panel (who have NOT met/talked to the Interviewee) who then have to make a hiring decision based solely on the reports.
At that point the panel makes the call based on a biased report and it thinks the decision is unbiased which is not true.
As an example no words which might create a impression but sticking to facts. The inference is left to the second panel. For example instead of saying the candidate thought hard about the given problem say something like the candidate tried out 3 different solutions to the problem over the interview time period. The first panel are merely conveyors of Data; so their reports have to be detailed and to the point.