Strike the Right Tone in Your Portrait (or Die Penniless)

If you don’t have a good headshot, you will probably never get a promotion, and spend the rest of your life filling out TPS reports before retiring to your van down by the river. I am only partly joking here.

Research from Princeton shows that we form opinions of people based on the briefest (40 millisecond!) glance at their photo, and that we can form very different opinions of the same person based on slight variations in their facial expressions. Not fair, but true.

Add to this the fact that so many of our personal interactions are now virtual, and you see that your online images are quite important. If you look like a jerk or an axe murderer, no one will want to work with you. If you avoid photos altogether, that doesn’t help either: LinkedIn’s internal research shows that a profile with a photo is seven times more likely to be reviewed.

So you need some sort of photo clearly. And if it’s for a dating profile, the photo of you from that vacation in Cancun might work, but for business purposes you will want to strike a more professional tone. Just getting any old studio headshot is not enough however. I see lots of headshots with professional lighting, but the subject looks constipated, startled, goofy, angry, over photoshopped or some ungodly combination of these. Remember that research from Princeton: The devil is in the details, the subtle variations in your facial expressions make all the difference.