Comment by vbtemp
4 years ago
Definitely beautiful and would love for something simple and clean to eat LinkedIn's lunch.
I don't have much to add in addition to everyone else except this: I am really disturbed by the common meme of faces-inside-circles. Why do we need faces? It just distracts from the content. I love the idea of being able to link former colleagues together - that's neat - but I'm very anti-face and there are any number of ways to do it that does not involve people's pictures.
Edit: Wow this got a lot of upvotes. So, I'll continue for a sec: There is so, so much conscious and unconscious judgment and game playing with pictures, I don't even know where to start. Let's leave this to be simple, clean and beautiful without the faces.
This is really tough - humans are hardwired to form connections and remember people by recognizing faces. This, of course, is also exactly the problem, in that it allows for bias or prejudice of many different types to influence our judgements.
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.
With real names, faces are just one google search away for most people (and we could debate further what would it mean if a face wasn't found).
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.
You can’t really stop people from finding your face online if it’s on social media, but you can present the information so that you’d first read the text and then see a photo.
Move the photo on the profile to the bottom of it, and make it optional.
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> With real names, faces are just one google search away for most people (and we could debate further what would it mean if a face wasn't found).
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.
> With real names
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.
Wasteland of white sameness? That's a funny way of saying simple and uncluttered.
> mingling jumphoppers racking up impressive paper stats
What does this mean?
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what did I just read
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.
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We should do away with names on applications as well. Names can tell me about the gender and often the ethnicity of the applicant, which are both also ripe for discriminating against. With an online application, we can just replace the applicant's name with an ID number and associate the two in some database that the employer doesn't see until the applicant is hired.
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!
> "never have to see or hear them at all!"
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 couldn’t initially tell if your second paragraph was meant sarcastically or not.
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.
Nobody is sarcarstic on the internet, ever.
That would eliminate bias, but also totally de-humanize work. People are shitty to each other sometimes, but is it worth throwing out all human connection to eliminate a subset of undesirable behaviors?
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.
Sounds like how Illuminati meetings are depicted.
You won't hear objections from me.
Yes, this is how we run them ... erm, I mean, what?
Would that be the same number you tattooed on their arms, or is this too humanizing for this approach?
Around ten direct replies to your post and I still don't feel like the reason why pictures on CVs is a bad idea has been explained explicitly.
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.
You realise that someones race, age, gender, disability etc are all easily inferred as soon as you meet someone in person?
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.
Ten minutes ago I agreed. There is bias to be fixed, but perhaps this is not the place to do so. But then, do you really need to know their name and gender _before_ the interview? I think there is an argument here for obscuring the face and other PII from the resume and letting people clear the initial screen bias free. It of course won't cure all or the most severe forms of discrimination, but it might reduce the subconcious biases that we all have. There's certainly a level of fuzziness here, but PII seems a reasonable line to draw for the in / out.
But this is not about eradicating all opportunities for bias, it is about reducing them. Making e.g. the filtering of resumes blind to race and gender would likely improve the situation, even if e.g. the interview still provides opportunity for biases to creep in.
But gender can often be derived by first name...
And ethnicity by last name, age by looking at the education section of the resume, etc.
People’s names can also be used to racially discriminate.
I mean no one's made an argument why it shouldn't be _optional_ if it already isn't either, as well as people are confusing the context of HR/Hiring Manager's shifting through resumes and traversing their own social graph on LinkedIn whether by search or connections list.
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 mean no one's made an argument why it shouldn't be _optional_ if it already isn't either,
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.
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They're definitely overused in a lot of designs. They can be useful to portray some information at a glance in some data-heavy designs, but I don't find them helpful here -- I find them distracting.
Comparison CV with/without faces: https://i.imgur.com/u6FVLqr.png
i don't even get what the faces should indicate? former coworkers? people that the person was managing?
The best intent I can think of is showing 1) team sizes, and/or 2) potentially-recognizable faces that a recruiter might interpret as "oh, s/he worked with someone I know is good at X".
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)_/¯
Distracting for sure.
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.
One could even go with a series of dots (or other visualisation), preferably in a neutral colour, that can be expanded to include faces, so you still get some visual indication of team/network size.
As is, it definitely just is visual clutter.
I agree with what you've said. I like the site and I think it's very nice, but I dislike headshots. https://twostepsforward.co/2015/10/on-web-authorship-trends/
Not a linkedin fan and I like the idea of focusing on what people use / want and not on what they don't.
That said, I suspect you underestimate the importance of pictures in terms of memory building and many other networking steps.
yet unless you were an actor resumes didn't have pictures attached for well forever.
I actually always made the name part big if I could - not to remember it but for the visual sort of like a face.
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.
But you handed them in, in person, and had an in person interview.
If anything, a picture is a loss of historically available visual data on a hire.
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I’m not sure how this plays out, but I know of one company that has an HR policy, stating that résumés that come in with photos or images of the applicants are to be immediately rejected.
I was told it was because they want to avoid bias charges.
Discard just the photo or the résumé entirely?
If the latter - do they acknowledge the irony?
The latter.
And what is this "irony" of which you speak?
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LinkedIn is unusable without faces. It's often the only way to know that you found the person you were searching for.
Perhaps this site doesn't need that functionality though.
If you look at it as a tool for recruiters, you won't be searching for specific people. You'll be searching for attributes/skills you're looking for, and then get a list.
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?
>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.
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.
maybe you see portraits of connections, but something else for those who've yet to connect. Or maybe portraits if it appears that you likely know the person? Similarly, maybe you can search by name or know the names of those you are connected to, but, by default, you don't get a pic or a name. Hmmmm.
The picture still helps to disambiguate which of the three John Smiths that went to University of Foobar was the one that you met at the mixer yesterday.
Yeah, I'm a fan of anyting to replace LinkedIn, but if your site requires a picture that I'm not going to sign up. I don't particularly mind if you make it available for people who want to do that, but it's a hard pass for me.
This site does not require a picture. I tried it.
Hi,
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.
I'm of relatively strong opinion.. but why just not have faces-in-circles anywhere? It would feel so liberating from all the social network gimmicks out there. To me it would then feel so real and down for business, rather than have a whole status/appearance signaling sub game.
What if the photo is optional and displayed at the bottom? Showing a practically mandated photo first puts a lot of unconscious biases in your head.
This is a relatively new trend, and probably has something with social media to do.
Yeah faces-in-circles is another one of many design tropes and fads that will soon be so dated, or look like lame Facebook knock off
I absolutely agree that faces should not be an available option.
I agree about the faces but I’ll go further - even if it were a list of names, it’s a distraction. My professional profile is about me. I can mention partners and collaborators in my position/project descriptions. You can drill down to find out who my colleagues are. But nobody has ever wished LinkedIn had a MySpace-style top eight.
European tech recruiter here (again).
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
> If I want to discriminate against you, I will anyway do so latest during the onsite.
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).
Usually, the firms require a PDF CV, so it is a private document shared between you and them, and it gets deleted after some weeks.
You found the hot-button topic...
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.
It's actually the norm in some parts of the world to have pictures on resumes
True, but I think there's a strong case to be made that it shouldn't be. It (further) opens the door to subtle biases on the grounds of ethnicity, age, and attractiveness, and has no obvious upside.
I do agree with you, I'm part of a visible minority, but some may argue that if the company have already a toxic environment I'd rather be off. This is especially true for small companies that media don't care about.
What do they use the picture for when they get them?
I don't know maybe someone from europe can answer ... I was just point it out that north america is not the world.
Speaking as someone who profits tremendously from the halo effect: I'm pro-face, but I remain anti-circle. Can we consider heptagons? They're like a less bellicose pentagon.
Without forced connections, how do you prevent people from tagging others in their profile without permission?
all the people standing up for faces are attractive, i myself like my face on a resume only because ive seen in the past how managers sort resumes, most of the time the face pics go to the top.
I just put an avatar that's not my face.
but what if my face is quite pretty and I want to share its outlook in some circle?
Might I suggest something more appropriate where other users are looking for it like Insta/FB/etc. Maybe if you're so special, try looking for an agent and get on a billboard on the side of the highway so that I can show you my improvemnts with a can of spray paint
I'm translating this as "don't you dare to joke with me"
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I really like the idea of the faces IF you select them to be in your bio and they are like verified to have been your teammates or something. It's a nice easy way of having references built into your resume
All else being equal, isn't attractiveness also a marketable asset in most if not all industries?
How does being pretty make me a better, or even more marketable programmer or sysadmin? I'm not user-facing, and interaction is mostly done by textual messages.
It may not. But where it is a marketable asset, is it somehow wrong to trade on that fact?