Here's Javier without a beard.
And here's Javier with a photoshopped beard.
You might not think the beard would make a lot of difference. You'd be wrong.
When Javier responded to job openings with the bearded picture, the response rate jumped from 12% to 35%.
He tried the experiment last year, when he worked for more than 1,200 hours on oDesk, an online marketplace to find work you can do from home.
If I ever come back to use these sites, I will try to spend time improving my profile before improving my newbie coding skills.
His blog contains a lot of handy job-seeking tips:
He shows the importance of using a catchy message in the web interface, boosting your ranking in the internal search engine and more. You can also follow him on Twitter.