In one of the HR-related articles on infowire.pl, I read that there's a new trend in job applications: companies looking for employees are no longer requesting candidates to include their photos with their documents.

In a recent recruitment process, we asked for CVs without a cover letter but with a photo. Moreover, it was so important to us that while we did read CVs without photos, we put them in a special folder. This photo requirement made me think. Are we so old-fashioned, not feeling the trend, or maybe the trend is still too bold...

Why are photos being dropped? Well, it's because companies want the best employees, meaning specialists in their field, and appearance doesn't matter at all. What counts are competencies, not pleasant looks, which can sometimes actually be a hindrance because we tend to attribute stereotypical traits to people we subjectively consider attractive or not. As a result, someone might conclude that, for example, a beautiful woman can't be a team leader of programmers (because she surely doesn't know her stuff).

I agree with the premise that knowledge and experience are what matter. Therefore, indeed, we could technically drop photos when conducting recruitment. When we were looking for employees some time ago, we weren't aware of this trend and asked for photos. But I think that even now, knowing about it, we would still include a request for a photograph.

As with many things, there are probably two schools of thought here, and perhaps it changes over time.
For now, I'm in favor of photos (of course, what kind of photo it is matters enormously, but that's another topic).

Of course, we carefully examine what candidates do, what experience they have, we assess competencies during meetings, and sometimes ask them to complete a task.
Nevertheless, the photo is important to us. When we read someone's CV, we naturally get to know a large part of their life: education, professional experience, we learn their age and what they like to do in their free time.
A photo makes the CV stop being an anonymous and somewhat soulless document.
The photo makes the information in the document come alive. We look at the person who might become our colleague at work.

I'm very curious how many people knew about this trend. What do you think about photos? Do you include them in your CVs? Do you request them when recruiting employees, or are you consciously choosing not to?

And why did CVs without photos sent to us go into a separate folder? We assumed
that if we explicitly ask for a photo, and yet the candidate doesn't include one, it might mean they didn't read the job posting carefully. We were recruiting for an accounting department position, where attention to detail is very important.