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Comment by offtop5 | Hacker News Reader

While I love linkedin, as it makes it very easy to apply to so many jobs, the photos seriously need to be removed.

A person's physical attractiveness should play no role in hiring, many people who are disabled might not be able to take photogenic pics. Those people are heavily disadvantaged, any person of color is heavily disadvantaged, I really hate the idea of social media creeping into LinkedIn.

For one it doesn't make a lot of sense for your political or social views to become a part of your employability. It's a resume not a statement on who you are. Then again I generally hate social media because it leads to the least informed shouting the loudest.

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LinkedIn used to constantly harass me with popups asking me why I hadn't uploaded a photo. Guess I'd have felt a lot worse if the answer was "because I'm insecure about my appearance" or "because experience tells me some people have issues with my ethnicity" or "because I did upload a photo once, and then realised that the people who looked at my profile also looked at other profiles of people in completely different roles who had similar facial features to me and found it really creepy" and not simply that I didn't want to.

Bit of the first box. A lot of not wanting to. My facebook photo is from over 15 years ago with sunglasses...

And generally I have come to conclusion that I do not want my photo to be shared online. I'm just old fashioned that way.

My Facebook photo is from when I signed up, at a time when I needed a university email address to do so, but I'm quite happy sticking other photos on there. As for LinkedIn, mostly I just don't care whether clients know what I look like, but I think the repeated surveys got some ruder answers!

Sorry but your understanding of what LinkedIn is for is kinda limited.

If your big problem is you are applying for jobs and you think your appearance has something to do with your outcomes, you can easily just not have a photo there.

But there's a huge element of LI that depends on photos. For example - I get an invitation to connect. I don't recognize the name but I recognize the face - it's the woman I gave my business card to because she was in my industry.

Or - I am interested in to talk to someone who works at Bank of America (or whatever) because I am interested in what it's like to work there. Oh, I see my contact John Smith works there. Who's John Smith, again? Oh yeah I remember the face - it's that nice guy who sat next to my team 3 jobs ago - let me ping him. The

I have a tool I use for hiring that purposely removes name, location and photos from applicants data that I review.

It helps perception of the prime facts by removing largely irrelevant data.

I'd be interested in a tool like that. I try not to look at the names of applicants and drop anyone who supplies a headshot but it would be nice to have that information filtered out.

Yes, several applicants supplied a headshot for the last engineering role I hired for.

I wonder if Antibias for Chrome is what the parent post was talking about: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/antibias/gfeilphhb...

The agency that developed it wrote about it here: https://www.bynd.com/case-study/antibias

I've not used it, but I think the idea is thoroughly neat.

I'm not using that tool, I've got my own, but thanks for the tip.

> A person's physical attractiveness should play no role in hiring

Are you also against in-person or video interviews?

I would definitely be okay with phone only interviews, but this is more of a like when a recruiter's browsing through hundreds of candidates he or she shouldn't see pictures first.

That's not all LinkedIn is for though. If it was a submit-your-resume-for-recruiter-screening website, your suggestion to remove the pictures would make sense. But it's used in a very different way which is why I don't think the pictures are a problem.

What are you talking about, you can definitely apply for jobs on LinkedIn and your photo is front and center. If the person receiving that application doesn't have the most positive reaction to your photo, maybe you suffer a disability which leaves your face disfigured, you're much less likely to get a job

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