I've experienced it before, though, when a candidate was rejected. The hiring manager thought he or she did not have a professional LinkedIn profile picture. Or an unconscious bias about a specific first and/or last name. Not only by the hiring manager but also by everybody. We are all humans.
Now LinkedIn Recruiter had, for some time now, an admin option to hide profile photos from all recruiters. I did test it once at a large organization. And did I expect a lot of resistance? No resistance; they didn't even notice it.
Yesterday while preparing for my sourcing training, I suddenly discovered an extra button in the project settings.
Communicate about new features, LinkedIn.
Hide candidate photos and names
Turn on to hide photos and names in the talent pool of this project. Names will be shown in messaging and the pipeline.
Turned on this slide, and what did I see? Abbreviations and no profile pictures. Eureka. Blind sourcing is getting closer. Especially if you search with a hiring manager. Whether or not this person has a professional photo or whether their name is Marcel, Abdullah or Vladimir is gone.
Below is a screenshot of my profile. I have become S.T.W.B. without a profile picture.
Names will be shown in LinkedIn messaging and the pipeline.
I understand that it does show up in the message function and in the pipeline. You must at least know the first name because Dear S.T.W.B. looks so sloppy. And if you want to search a little further because her or his LinkedIn profile is a little empty. Got it.
Can you also set blind sourcing for the entire organization?
As an admin, you can also enforce this feature for the entire organization.
You can do this in your product settings > preferences > hide photos and names of candidates. Recruiters and/or sourcers can disable this temporarily, though. In the talent pool, they can decide to choose to display and show the names of candidates temporarily at the top right.
Review feature of LinkedIn Recruiter.
Now I was curious to see if LinkedIn's review feature would also work like this. Unfortunately, no. With your hiring manager or your client, just the first and last names are fully visible, as well as the profile picture. I do think this is a shortcoming.
Even if it's just an option for that one hiring manager who finds the profile picture just a little less professional.
