Should you put a photo on your résumé?

The convention isn't arbitrary, and it isn't about taste. It comes from anti-discrimination practice: the EEOC's guidance on prohibited employment policies states plainly that “employers should not ask for a photograph of an applicant”, adding that “if needed for identification purposes, a photograph may be obtained after an offer of employment is made and accepted.”

That guidance is addressed to employers rather than to you, which is the detail most articles on this subject skip. But it explains everything downstream: a US recruiting team that has been trained to avoid collecting images of candidates does not want an unsolicited one arriving in the first document they read. Some organisations strip photos before a résumé reaches a hiring manager. Others simply move on, because a photo signals unfamiliarity with how hiring works there.

Nothing prohibits you from putting a photo on your own document, and nobody is going to penalise you for it in any formal sense. It's worth being precise about that, because the internet tends to state this rule as though it carried legal force for applicants. It doesn't.

What makes it a bad bet is the shape of the payoff. The upside is that someone finds you likeable a few seconds earlier than they otherwise would. The downside is a document that reads as out of step with local norms, in a process where you're being compared against people whose documents don't have that problem. Small upside, avoidable downside, in a context where you already have a place to put your photo. That's a straightforward decision.

There's a mechanical argument as well as a cultural one. Résumés are frequently parsed by software before a person sees them, and that software is reading text. An image contributes nothing it can use, and the layouts that photos tend to arrive with — text boxes, headers, side columns, tables — are a well-known source of parsing errors that scramble your actual experience into the wrong fields.

The safest structure is boring: a single column, real text, standard section headings, saved as a PDF unless you're told otherwise. Every decorative element you add is a small bet that whatever opens the file handles it gracefully, and there's rarely a reason to take that bet with the document your application depends on.

This is a regional norm, not a universal one. Across much of continental Europe — Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and neighbours — a photo on the application has traditionally been standard, and leaving it off can read as an omission rather than a choice, though the expectation has been softening for years. Similar conventions hold across much of Asia, where some countries use standardised application formats that include a photo outright, and in parts of Latin America and the Middle East.

Two things follow. First, if you're applying across regions, keep two versions of the document rather than compromising with one. Second, don't take a headshot company's blog post as your source on any given country's current practice — these conventions are shifting, and the reliable check is to look at how candidates present themselves on the largest job board in that market, or to ask one person who hires there. That's a five-minute question with a definitive answer.

Leaving the photo off the document doesn't mean nobody sees your face. A recruiter who likes your application looks you up — that's not a maybe, it's the next step in the process — and what they find is a photo you either chose or didn't. The choice isn't whether to have a professional photo. It's whether the one they find is the one you'd have picked.

So put it where it's expected and useful: your LinkedIn profile, any candidate profile in a company's own application portal, your portfolio or personal site, a professional association directory, and your email avatar if you're corresponding directly. Our job seeker page covers how those surfaces fit together, and the same photo should appear on all of them — one repeated face is far easier to remember than four different ones.

When the market expects it, treat it as a formal element rather than a decorative one. A plain background, professional dress consistent with the industry, a straightforward head-and-shoulders crop, and a neutral or lightly smiling expression. Place it in a top corner at a modest size — large enough to be legible, small enough that it doesn't push your experience onto a second page.

The technical requirements are the same as any profile photo, and the LinkedIn specifications guide covers what a well-sized file looks like. What to wear applies unchanged: a solid mid-tone, nothing patterned, nothing with text on it.

Applying in the US: no photo on the document, and a good photo on every profile it points to. Applying somewhere the photo is expected: include one, make it a real headshot rather than a cropped snapshot, and keep the layout simple enough to survive being parsed. Applying in both: two documents, which takes about ten minutes to maintain.

In every one of those cases you need one decent photograph of your face, which is the part worth actually solving. Everything else here is a formatting decision.