Who said hiring is fair?
>Any company that would be this lazy as to potentially throw away their best candidates in the first round of filtering on criteria that has such little actual signalling is not one that I would want to work for anyway.
For most companies (not talking Facebook and Google level stuff) it doesn't really matter -- and they could care less if you would work for them or if they get top talent or not. Any decent-ish programmer can do the work they require, so they are OK with being lazy in hiring.
Even the CEO, who has skin in the game, won't be entirely dependent on making the best possible hire (hopefully).
Most job seekers are terrible at job seeking. What does that say about how good managers are at hiring?
(Also, managers has to look at hundreds of different candidates.)
Pro-tip: no one wants to see a Nikon in your profile picture and no one cares about your photography hobby on your resume. I'm talking to you, half of the tech community on Linkedin!
I agree that many of the filters that people use are bullshit.
(You've most likely also read https://web.archive.org/web/20120501193533/http://raganwald.... too, a point in which is that other BS filters act just like the toss-half one in that they aren't really useful when your qualified applicant proportion is small.)
You'd be surprised. Might not be so explicit, but randomness (ie luck) plays a huge role in filtering process.