I think I agree with you that the downsides and inherent unfairness of the genetic attractiveness lottery outweigh the upsides of attaching a name to a face. It's an empirical question then whether this works for users.

Functionally the website would be a wasteland of white sameness without portraits, no way around that I think.

I'm not entirely convinced this service solves the linkedin pitfall of mingling jumphoppers racking up impressive paper stats and polluting the signal.

Move the photo on the profile to the bottom of it, and make it optional.

> You can’t really stop people from finding your face online if it’s on social media

Hey, some of us worked pretty hard for this to not be true, so at the very least the photo should be optional. I’m blessed with a common first and last name and outside of my HN username I am pretty un-Googlable. Someone very motivated could probably find an old photo of me or two but it’s not universally true that everyone’s photo is a simple search away.

But it becomes an added hassle for those people, thus making it UX hostile for stalkers. Who is actually going to Google each and every other name on somebody else's collaborator list? Some determined stalkers I guess, but they are not going to be deterred anyways.

On the point of faces not being found, as a counterexample, some of my former MDs did not put pics in their LinkedIn. Yet people in the industry knew them by name, even if they weren't rockstar investors or something. Having heard someone's name from other sources such as word of mouth or from newspaper articles is a much better signal than using names to recognize them.

Most people reviewing CVs don't need to see the real names. It'd be great to have a CV service that could render the CV either with or with out them.

Also, maybe I'm the only one, but I'm starting to experience a bit of 'mindfulness' fatigue. Seems like it's mindlessly being added to everything regardless of whether it makes any sense or not, so I dislike 'Mindful professional profiles' as a subhead.

What does this mean?

mask the photo and the name. use regional locale detection and user choice to make fake names for everyone, use GAN to create fake profile pictures.

Presumably you're talking about locale detection of the hiring company/reviewer rather than locale detection of the CV submitter.

I really like the idea, although practically it's probably not a good one in small companies where people are likely to actually work with the person whose CV they're reviewing.

I would say stick to placeholders that are obviously placeholders in order to avoid confusion. And obviously there are some people who do need to see the real names, so give them a clear deanonymise step.

Actually, now with remote work, even after the applicant is hired, we still never have to see or hear them at all! We can just keep referring to them as Employee #1672378623, use a randomly-generated avatar for our Zoom meetings, and filter everyone's voice through voice-changer software. Bias-be-gone!

Not sure if you're joking, but IMO this is throwing out the baby with the bath water.

I like the idea of hiding details from the hiring filter and selection process that may contribute to bias, but never seeing or hearing the people I'm working with!? Sounds truly terrible.

Also, unless your voice changer actually selects/changes the words/pronunciation of the speaker, it will still be easy to identify details about them.

Accent, word-choice (soda vs pop), urban fast-talk, rural drawl all can be picked up even with a distorted voice.

I also want to do away with discrimination. But people’s faces and voices express emotion, character, and warmth

Your utopia sounds absolutely horrible.

I met my wife at work, she is a different ethnicity and culture than me.

I think there's definitely benefits to making open application positions more anonymous, but purely anonymous employment sounds terrible. You can already kinda get that with some outsourcing firms, and it's only useful for a very limited set of tasks.

You won't hear objections from me.

I'm in the UK, where race, age, gender, religion, disability are among protected characteristics. As such, that information, should it be included, is often either stripped from the CV automatically or the CV discarded entirely to obviate the risk of being accused of discrimination.

It doesn't matter what you do here, if someone wants to reject someone based on gender, race, etc, they can do so easily and just say they weren't good enough. This is the ultimate elephant in room with hiring and it's always been there and always will be unless we somehow do hiring while never talking to someone or seeing them or knowing their real-name.

Even if it wasn't expressly forbidden under law, no one was ever rejecting someone from a job "because they are black/white/female/etc/etc/", that's always been obviously wrong, but it's easy enough to simply say "They're not a culture fit." or "Not experienced enough" or "Didn't answer the technical questions well enough."

I don't think banning people's faces on resumes or CVs would fix anything, the only thing that would "fix" this is changing our implicit and unconscious biases from childhood onwards, i.e. a major change to our teaching culture, and across all the media, TV, movies, books etc.

This site could even, when it gets up to supporting some social graph, separate the two views, HR is using bookmarks/folder organization/some other means of solving that problem anyway so "photos key to memory" is irrelevant

I'll give you an argument against optional headshots: Adverse selection.

Given the advantages and disadvantage of having a headshot, most of the folks omitting them will have good reason to do so. Which means that those who don't have a headshot will be disadvantaged further.

IOW, not having a headshot signals one of three things: "I care about my privacy more than most people", "I couldn't be bothered to include a headshot", or "I am a member of a group that experiences prejudice based on superficial characteristics, such as weight or race, and wish to avoid this". There is a long tail of possible reasons and variations on these, for example the privacy one could actually be more along the lines of "I am hiding from my violent ex", but you get the drift.

None of these possible reasons are ones that give a reader warm fuzzy feelings. If the profile owner is very lucky, the reader will treat the absence of a headshot as largely irrelevant metadata, but that's the best case scenario: one of merely avoiding negative associations. There is no actual upside (the one exception I can come up with is an employer actually looking for candidates who are fanatical about their privacy for some reason, perhaps for security-related positions).

At least when you include a headshot you are only going to get hit with the actual relevant prejudice (which is a social filter that can be useful to you), rather than a stew of prejudices attached to all the imagined or assumed reasons for the image's absence, none of them consciously or coherently articulated.

...unless the "I would experience prejudice" reason is correct.

Comparison CV with/without faces: https://i.imgur.com/u6FVLqr.png

But both are likely wishful thinking: I'm sure it's just a list of faces of other users who've put that company/product on their own CV on that particular site, which 1) is an incomplete and unverified potential-subset of people (and therefore not a good representation of team sizes), and 2) hugely unlikely for it to ever be relevant to a recruiter (because how likely is it for your audience to recognize effectively-random faces?).

But yeah, could just as well be people they managed, or people from that company, or people who endorsed them for their specific work in that role, etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's also useless to the vast majority of readers, but since it is useful to some, a better option would be to have "X connections" (or "X colleagues") note that expands into a list on click. Color it gray, right-align and you now have a secondary info for those who need it, but out of the way for those who don't.

As is, it definitely just is visual clutter.

That said, I suspect you underestimate the importance of pictures in terms of memory building and many other networking steps.

Note: I've also seen that for minority / female hiring, a face can really jump your resume up as it makes clear you may help add some diversity to a team.

If anything, a picture is a loss of historically available visual data on a hire.

I have done that exactly once, at a college recruiting event in 2002, and the person who took it and gave me the pre-screen interview never saw me again until after I was hired.

> and had an in person interview

Are you under the impression this has gone away?

Tech jobs are all remote, all the time now.

I was told it was because they want to avoid bias charges.

If the latter - do they acknowledge the irony?

And what is this "irony" of which you speak?

Yeah, it is whacky, but most HR departments are run by lawyers, these days, and lawyers have a strange set of rules.

Perhaps this site doesn't need that functionality though.

If you're an individual applying for a job, you'd link to your profile, so the recruiter who receives your application won't need to search.

If you're connecting with someone you know personally, then you should already have enough information at hand in order to know you have the right person based on their listed work experience.

The only time you might search is when you're doing professional networking and only have a name. But you usually have some other piece of info, like the company they work for, and possibly their broad job function or title. 99% of the time that should be enough to disambiguate people with the same name. And if all you have is a name, maybe you haven't really "networked" with them enough to warrant a connection?

But the point isn't to connect to those people. They're a phone call/e-mail away. It's to connect with and maintain the connection to the randos that you briefly meet.

In the view of replies posted, I think profile pics (hereafter avatars) in colleague section are fine to have but dIefinitely not a necessity.

IMHO, here is an optimal solution:

Couldn't there be a two way option: whether i want to share my avatar in the circle, and if i want to look at other avatars?

It would be pretty effective.Lets say, I'm not interested in avatar of your colleagues, so i can turn them off or they would be in a drop down list. And say if I don't want you to see my avatar in colleagues section/list, I can turn it off from my side. So, you would only see a default avatar associated with my profile.

This is a relatively new trend, and probably has something with social media to do.

If I want to discriminate against you, I will anyway do so latest during the onsite.

I often have to skim through 200 CVs in a day and do >10 calls. I find it very convenient to have a face attached to the CV, because it helps me remember the person.

People hire people and people have faces.

I understand why people feel it is a burden to make and put a photo on the CV but I see so much updside also for candidates that I always recommend to add a photo. Here in Europe it's not forbidden but actually common. If you don't do it, you're the weirdo and your profile might get forgotten/ignored. Why risk this? I made a video to explain this once and not have to tell this to people again and again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELX85HAhHew

It is different. Many people want to maintain their image out of the public internet. I would never use a service that forces me to show my face to the public (not that there's anything wrong with my face, I just want it that way).

If it was just a CV repository, I would be quite comfortable with this approach. Some regions have a social mandate to include photos on CVs and it bothers me quite a bit. Where I live Marital status / number of children is also common which I really don't understand.

Because this is set up as a web of professional landing pages though, part of the system is discovering people that you may know or finding people that you're looking for (and not just getting a link from someone to their CV).

I'd love an option to turn it off site-wide though, that could be a nice feature if you prefer to more-dissociate your connections from their physical selves.