There's an elephant in the room: hiring is by nature biased.

I have yet to witness an hiring process that isn't biased. As an anecdote, in a past small business job, a colleage (that accumulated the hiring manager hat) used to choose people (always opposite sex) by photo and had even the literal approval of the company owner to do so. To corroborate this, I remember two persons "hired by photo" commenting that they never had any trouble getting job interviews. It may indicate that "hiring by photo" is rather common.

We like to forget that most jobs don't allow 10X'ers. Choosing "the best" is normally just a form of "early optimization". My take on this (but I might be biased) is trial most and only hire who adds enough value.

Like I said below, you cannot fully outlaw and police tribalism, human bias and cronyism that is evolutionary ingrained in us as a species since the dawn of man.

It is also the practice in some Asian countries. I applied for a job at a Japanese university and they wanted a photo.

Yeah, those footers are just for the "more equal" crowd. Anyone I know who actually wants to discriminate, still gets away with it. Those who don't don't. But at least now the average diversity idealist is appeased.

AFAIK, photos and birthday are not allowed in US to prevent such discrimination so how would they do it then?

They're referring to diversity programs as discrimination.

I am surprised that Germany hasn't been taken to the European court of human rights over this abuse.

Maybe those German privacy activists going after google et all might want to look at this.

Because in Germany/Europe discrimination is officially illegal so it is assumed nobody does it, even though people know better, and because you cannot fully outlaw and police tribalism, human bias and cronyism that is evolutionary ingrained in us as a species since the dawn of man.

Putting more legislative hoops in place means HR will just need to find more creative ways to formulate job requirements in order to exclude certain classes of people or more creative ways of justifying not taking you application further, but ultimately won't solve the core issue.

There's also the Arbeitszeugnis thing (a summary of how they see you as an employee, given when you leave the company). If your boss doesn't like you, they can fuck up your future a bit by giving you a bad Zeugnis (future employers typically want to see those).

It's effectively illegal to complain about employees in Zeugnis, but they can reorder words and skip some phrases to imply that you're a bad employee. If you're not German you might even think you got a good Zeugnis because it looks well on the surface, but there's the entire code you need to learn to read these.

Ah the "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown" defence.

or maybe you ned some high profile sackings of HR directors at a few big German companies ala github.

Sackings? On what ground? Proving there's any kind of malice or bias in rejected applications is nearly impossible as the main job of HR is to protect the company from any hiring bias leaking out. That's why your rejection email is usually some generic copy-paste message and they usually refuse to give you any feedback upon request

Except they straight up ask you for your racial etnicity, disabilities and gender.