2 ms·

The whole photographs thing is a real mixed bag anyways. Seeing a picture to jog your memory is sometimes great. But it's also a great way to enable racial an

by mlyle 3y ago

The whole photographs thing is a real mixed bag anyways. Seeing a picture to jog your memory is sometimes great. But it's also a great way to enable racial and age discrimination: see the face and decide you interpret all the rest of the context in the profile differently (even inadvertently). Sure, you'll know the race / age / etc eventually, but at least if the person is in the door they have a chance instead of getting chucked in the bin during screening.

michaelmrose 3y ago
This is very true. Further its not only true of people you would consider bigots. We can all fall victim to unconscious biases. Unfortunately if only people of a certain stripe omit them there is no reason believe it would be effective. People respond well to pictures. This can be enabled in truth by names as well. Most notably obviously for race/national origin. A notable study found that the exact resume received fewer call backs when the name was a typical white name vs a name indicative of ethnicity. To a lesser extent you can also consider age in relation to name as some names have drastically increased or decreased in popularity over time. This makes me think that a productive solution would have to take place in HR as opposed to grass roots. Ideally you really want people to review candidates initially without benefit of name or face and only after selecting a subset view potentially biasing information. Maybe there should be a HR mode for LinkedIn which by default hides these details and shows other items while allowing you to make a saved list of prospective hires to pass down the food chain.
RagnarD 3y ago
Let's be real here. Ageism is perhaps the last widely accepted prejudice in the tech industry (and probably more broadly). People who'd shrink in horror at admitting to a skin color or gender based prejudice freely dismiss "old people" for most software jobs. It's rampant.

by mlyle 3y ago

michaelmrose 3y ago

This is very true. Further its not only true of people you would consider bigots. We can all fall victim to unconscious biases. Unfortunately if only people of a certain stripe omit them there is no reason believe it would be effective. People respond well to pictures. This can be enabled in truth by names as well. Most notably obviously for race/national origin. A notable study found that the exact resume received fewer call backs when the name was a typical white name vs a name indicative of ethnicity. To a lesser extent you can also consider age in relation to name as some names have drastically increased or decreased in popularity over time. This makes me think that a productive solution would have to take place in HR as opposed to grass roots. Ideally you really want people to review candidates initially without benefit of name or face and only after selecting a subset view potentially biasing information. Maybe there should be a HR mode for LinkedIn which by default hides these details and shows other items while allowing you to make a saved list of prospective hires to pass down the food chain.

RagnarD 3y ago

Let's be real here. Ageism is perhaps the last widely accepted prejudice in the tech industry (and probably more broadly). People who'd shrink in horror at admitting to a skin color or gender based prejudice freely dismiss "old people" for most software jobs. It's rampant.