&gt;<i>Using something like &quot;professional-looking LinkedIn picture&quot; as a filter is just throwing out candidates for the sake of getting the number lower.</i><p>Who said hiring is fair?<p>&gt;<i>Any company that would be this lazy as to potentially throw away their best candidates in the first round of filtering on criteria that has such little actual signalling is not one that I would want to work for anyway.</i><p>For most companies (not talking Facebook and Google level stuff) it doesn&#x27;t really matter -- and they could care less if you would work for them or if they get top talent or not. Any decent-ish programmer can do the work they require, so they are OK with being lazy in hiring.