I'm german and i did not know this.

I'm also German:

In former days (until perhaps the end of the 90s) sending in a photo as part of an application was expected. But by now the customs have changed.

They should stop doing that then. Absolutely no good reason for it in the first place, other than discrimination.

In this day and age of AI overdrive, it may in fact be a more and more viable way to verify candidates.

How so ?

Job applications already get inunduated with hundreds, thousands of candidates, of which 90% are bots submitting for canddiates. Some companies are resorting to the dreaded video submissions to filter that out, but even that may not be safe long term.

Photos may not be the final solution to this flood of automation, but it's being dabbled with.

Sure but I see absolutely no way a picture would allow you to tell if someone's a bot or not.

You can already generate a profile picture and have it lip synced with a text to speech audio (or even speech to speech). It's a losing (lost?) fight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK8sgB-58q0

Internet is rapidly becoming a pile of steaming shit already, captchas were annoying but now it seems the "are you a robot" test is coming everywhere, what a sad state of affairs. I wonder how much of the overall traffic is automated, 80%? 90% ?

Adding a field that AI can generate cheaply sounds like a way to INCREASE AI spam

cheap is part of the factor here. Pictures aren't expensive to generate, but are a magnitude more expensive than generating a bunch of text. Meanwhile, pictures are trivial for humans to verify against a simple search.

> Meanwhile, pictures are trivial for humans to verify against a simple search

The majority of people do not have a picture of them on the Internet.

What do you mean by "demand"?

https://bewerbung.com/lebenslauf-ohne-bewerbungsfoto/

> Eine Bewerbung ohne Foto zu verschicken, ist in den vergangenen Jahren zu einem regelrechten Trend geworden. Bei vielen Personalern genießen Lebensläufe ohne Bewerbungsfoto daher eine hohe Akzeptanz [...]

I'd say that depends on the business area, the small "Krauter" around the corner probably requires a photo. But as this is not the target group of this project, I would argue that images are not really required.

I meant it as more of a nice to have

Disclaimer: I’m bad about remembering faces. Every photo with a name below helps me a lot.

We shall not copy everything from America.

And the site goes on…

    Trotzdem ist die Bewerbung ohne Foto nach wie vor eher die Ausnahme als die Regel. Denn ein sympathisches Bild erweckt einen guten ersten Eindruck. Somit wird Deine Bewerbung mit einer positiveren Grundeinstellung gesichtet, was zum Vorteil werden kann.

    Richtig gestaltet, drückt das Bewerberbild außerdem Professionalität aus, lässt Deine Persönlichkeit erkennen und verdeutlicht, dass Du zur Unternehmenskultur passt. Grundlegende Informationen wie Dein Geschlecht oder Deine Herkunft lassen sich aus Deinem Lebenslauf ohnehin oft ableiten, beispielsweise aus Deinem Namen. Zudem finden die Personaler im Internet meist schnell ein Foto von Dir, wenn gewünscht.

The company will anyway see you, if you’re lucky. Your name, birthdate, education and address (people often underestimate the address) tell a lot. I don’t care about colors of hair, eyes or skin and the scar across the check is at least something which allows me to recognize a person.

In my humble European opinion, you shouldn't be including your date of birth or home address either. Full name is just about acceptable.

<irony> And a cell phone number from a throw away phone?

Of course for every application a new one! </irony>

> We shall not copy everything from America.

You should copy not needing photos on CVs. Doing so introduces an unacceptable risk of bias.

Not all bias is bad.

It is when it's based purely on physical appearance in the context of evaluating job applicants.

It's a myth or 80s thing (maybe in GDR).

I worked in multiple German companies, never had photo in my CV, never had been asked for a photo. This is just not true.