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I had a boss who would put one simple instruction at the end of the job posting - "Please send your resume as a PDF". This was for a technician job at an MSP. He would immediately delete any applications that didn't have a PDF attached. If I recall, it was something like 60% of the applications he got that he deleted immediately.

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I made an open application for someone to receive feee weekly mentorship to become a software engineer. I asked for a < 1 minute video. 18/20 applications didn’t include it. Made picking someone really easy.

That heavily biases what kind of people you select. It's not about following instructions, it's about not caring for the weird requirement.

I was fine with that bias. No judgement if you don’t want to apply and send a video. Some judgement if you want to fill out the rest of the app and then just leave a portion out of it, making the rest of your time a waste.

And the mentorship was over video calls, so it’s not totally unrelated. My initial reasoning was just to make sure I could understand their spoken English enough to help, since I was offering it globally.

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