This is common practice in most countries but the US. In fact, you can read it the other way around: why do you think companies are now forced to not ask for pictures in the resumes in the US?
So apparently in 2006 Germany passed an Equal Treatment Act [1], which prevents discrimination on various grounds, including racial or ethnic origin, sex or sexual orientation, disability and age. All of these are things that a photograph could tell you about. I'd be curious if in practice this has resulted in employees winning cases against employees. If so, and there's no legitimate employment-related reason to need a picture (such as when hiring a model), then if I were an employer I would hesitate to request one.
I also happen to believe that it's ethically correct and coincidentally, economically optimal to not discriminate on the basis of those factors, in addition to it being the law in Germany (and the US, where I'm from, apart from sexual orientation in some places). Avoiding asking for a picture is a good signal that you don't intend to discriminate in that way.
If there's a good argument for why a picture is helpful for making better employment decisions, I'd love to hear it.
Saying that it's "common practice" does not answer the question of why you care what I look like. If a person can code, they can code, no matter what they look like. The only thing that a photo does is assist in discriminating based on looks, age, disability, and other non-job-related attributes.
As far as I know, there's nothing preventing U.S. companies from asking for photos with resumes. It's just not common, probably because how one looks is (usually) not relevant to being able to perform a given job.
In the US what companies ARE (in theory) forced to do by law is to not practice discrimination based on gender, age, religion, disabilities, and probably some other things. Which is great in my opinion, I wouldn't want to work for a company that did these things, or wanted irrelevant information from me, information that could only conceivably be used for the purposes of such discrimination.
Perhaps I'm naive, but I would have thought that start-ups, being as they are overly-concerned with "getting sh*t done", would be the last to discriminate on irrelevancies.
>> Perhaps I'm naive, but I would have thought that start-ups, being as they are overly-concerned with "getting sht done", would be the last to discriminate on irrelevancies.
Exactly! What I was trying to say was: because it's common practice, I don't think they are making a special case* of asking for a picture in the CV. Rather, they are just using what's considered the norm over there.
I didn't say that they're unique in doing this. I didn't say that it's not the norm, at least in some industries. Though I have to say I've never seen a start-up job ad from anywhere that demanded a photo.
What I AM trying to say is that 1) a photo obviously serves only the purpose of assisting with job discrimination, and 2) I would think that "young, innovative" (my words) start-ups would both not want to discriminate based on irrelevancies for ethical and legal reasons. I would also think that they'd understand that doing so is counterproductive to actually getting sh*t done.
Two anecdotes: On a recent train trip here in Germany I met a guy who was partner in a small consulting business. Very smart guy. Somehow we got on the photo-CV topic and he was astonished that they are unheard of in the States. He then recounted how in his earlier days, working for some other company, they'd placed an advertisement for an office assistant. Most of the replies were from women, and he said that all the guys in the office crowded around the stack of resumes to find the one woman who was hottest. I may be wrong, but in a male-dominated office I find it hard to believe that the "hotness factor" was not ultimately a part of the hiring decision, whether or not it was legal.
This same guy told me that his company "wasn't hiring women right now" due to the risk that a woman employee might choose to have babies. I was briefly in shock at hearing an employer state out loud that his company practiced gender-based discrimination. Obviously, with a photo CV in hand, even if a company was open to hiring women, it could use the photo to try to figure out if a candidate was of childbearing age or not, and reject their applications if so.
Nobody here or elsewhere has justified on any basis the need for a photo with a CV. It's pretty clear to me that it serves but a single purpose: employment discrimination based on appearance, gender, race, and perhaps disability. The fact that it's "common practice" is perhaps a remnant of an earlier time when discrimination based on such things was widely and openly accepted, a situation that I'd hope would have changed, especially in the generally-progressive start-up world.
