What Your Recruiter Isn't Telling You About Your Headshot

Nobody tells you this outright, because it sounds a bit blunt for a LinkedIn comment section, but it's true: people look at your photo before they read anything you've written. That's not a comment on modern attention spans — it's just how eyes and screens work. The photo loads first.

Most professionals will spend real money on a website, on ads, on a rebrand — and then use a photo cropped out of a wedding, a works Christmas do, or an ID badge taken under strip lighting a few years back. That photo is doing a full-time job it was never trained for. It's on your LinkedIn while you sleep, on your website, in your email signature, on every “meet the team” page you've ever appeared on — quietly making an argument for or against working with you, on a loop, forever.

Where Most Corporate Headshots Go Wrong

• The group-photo crop, where you can still see someone else's elbow

• The photo that's technically “recent” if you don't count the last few years

• The car-park selfie, taken at arm's length, uplit by a phone torch

• The photo where you're smiling so hard your eyes have checked out entirely

• The one that's fine, but was clearly taken by someone in a hurry

Recruiters look at your photo before your CV. That's not opinion — it's how loading order works.

What Actually Makes a Headshot Work

It isn't the backdrop or the lens. It's whether the person in front of the camera looks like themselves mid-conversation, rather than braced for an event. That's mostly down to how the session runs, not the kit — I spend the first chunk of any shoot just talking to you, about the job, the dog, the weather, anything, until you stop performing “professional” and just look like one. Then I take the photo.

I also come to you rather than asking you to find a studio, quote the full price before we start so there's nothing sprung on you afterwards, and if the shots land and you don't love them, we sort it out — no arguing about it.

It's Not Just for Individuals

If you run a team, this compounds. A “meet the team” page with six different photo styles, six different backgrounds and one person still using their old ID photo doesn't read as quirky — it reads as nobody got round to it. A proper team session, done in an afternoon, fixes that in one go and photographs everyone the way you'd actually want a client to see them.

The Bottom Line

You don't get a second go at a first impression, and online, the first impression is almost always a photograph. Fix the one thing that's working against you on every platform at once — book a session, and I'll come to wherever you are.