I know a number of people who have paid for someone to do the personality tests for them, but with video it’s gotten harder. It’s also gotten easier for companies to reject for tacit bias such as gender, race, and any other number of factors. There doesn’t seem to be any safe guards for it; we didn’t do it, the software did it.
>It’s also gotten easier for companies to reject for tacit bias such as gender, race, and any other number of factors
In some European countries like Germany, Spain and Austria it's not even tacit as it's tradition to have your photo and birthday in your resume, especially for more traditional companies, to the point where it generated some scandals in Austria and Germany since in some companies, being black or having Slavic/Turkish/Arabic names got your CV rejected by default even though the CVs would fit the requirements.
But it's ok, since they write in the footer of their career page that they don't discriminate on such things. /s
Edit: There's even some German satire about the racism job applicants face over having photos in resumes:
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.
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.
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.
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
I interviewed for my first employee a few weeks ago. I just opted for an audio call. I didn't want to judge candidates based on their coronavirus nest, coronavirus haircut, or anything that didn't influence their performance in a strictly remote job. I also didn't want to dress up.
That being said, German culture dictates that resumes have pictures, so it's sort of moot.
