alt Hacker NewsWhat you had for breakfast is not personal information, and of course nowhere near illegal. The worst employees are those who start out with an attitude that the employer is their enemy like this.
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In many countries (certainly the EU and UK), religion is certainly considered personal information, and this sort of question skirts fairly close to that if asked during eg. Lent or Ramadan.
And even outside those periods, it's completely unrelated to the job or the applicant's suitability for it. It might be fine as small talk when setting a candidate at ease or as an icebreaker, but it's unreasonable to expect to form a judgement based on their answer.
Besides, it's the sort of thing that an LLM-based system should easily be able to handle. I'm not sure it would ever give you any sort of useful signal.
Requiring to disclose your breakfast habits for a job application has not anything to do with your merit to the company, and gives grounds to the possibility of choosing people on sympathy to their answers to that question. It became frowned to include a picture into a CV, because this feeds implicit biases, why should that be any different with alimentary behaviour?
Honestly for dealing with job application spam, this sounds like a neat way to handle this, but without that context, it is just weird. Also it seems to be obsolete against people using LLMs for these applications, I expect them to be able to just invent an answer for that question just fine.