Unfortunately, "we didn't review your CV" is a great way to get sued in the US if the name of the applicant is in any way potentially indicative of the applicant's gender, race, religion, or any other protected status.
And we now see a lot of proof that that is warranted: lots of people in the US are now openly racist and/or have other prejudices. It is fair to assume many people don’t get a fair chance because of this.
The first company I worked for (a smallish business) interviewed a guy who seemed normal and knowledgeable enough in the screener call. At the time, they just asked that people being in code samples to discuss in the second interview (this predated GitHub) and he brought in some obviously copy-pasted code that didn't fit together.
He then, without prompt, in the middle of a conversation mentioned that he was the second coming of Christ. The interviewers ignored the comment and continued the interview.
When he didn't get the job, he sued the company for religious discrimination. Fortunately, the interviewers could honestly say they didn't discuss or ask about his religious beliefs, and he lost. It was said he did this elsewhere as a a scam, though I never verified it.
The simple matter of fact is that it doesn't matter how neutral you are; there are enough people out there who will look for any way to perceive and benefit from a grievance that you must assume they will.
Of course you're right, there will always be people that try to abuse the system. But the bigger picture here is that more people are truly being discriminated for their color, religion, sex, etc, than there are people abusing the system. A system that improves live for many should not be removed because some people try to abuse it.
We are discussing whether or not it is safe for a company to reply to an applicant with "we didn't review your CV".
The crux of my point is that the potential for a perceived grievance is sufficient to trigger legal action. Whether bigotry was involved or not is entirely beside the point, because even if the company absolutely was 100% not discriminating, they are still vulnerable for creating a situation where they could be perceived as having done so.
In no way am I advocating for removing protections for disadvantaged groups. I'm not arguing that bigotry doesn't exist. There's no point in bringing up the fact that it does.
You know what's cheaper than getting hundreds of baseless court cases dismissed? Not replying to someone with "we ignored your application".
Yes, there even exist whole department, organizations and industries of people for the sole purposes of hiring people based on race, sex and other non work related characteristics rather than merit which is the very definition of discrimination.
For good or ill -- probably the latter -- headshots are expected with CVs in most of Europe. It's a local custom.
Source: I worked in Germany and had to deal with this. (In fact, one of the ways I made my application stand out from other North Americans was to learn this ahead of time and include a headshot in my original application)
