I had a boss who would put one simple instruction at the end of the job posting - "Please send your resume as a PDF". This was for a technician job at an MSP. He would immediately delete any applications that didn't have a PDF attached. If I recall, it was something like 60% of the applications he got that he deleted immediately.
I made an open application for someone to receive feee weekly mentorship to become a software engineer. I asked for a < 1 minute video. 18/20 applications didn’t include it. Made picking someone really easy.
I was fine with that bias. No judgement if you don’t want to apply and send a video. Some judgement if you want to fill out the rest of the app and then just leave a portion out of it, making the rest of your time a waste.
And the mentorship was over video calls, so it’s not totally unrelated. My initial reasoning was just to make sure I could understand their spoken English enough to help, since I was offering it globally.
