Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, pro…
>> 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. 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.
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.