A crucial part of your LinkedIn profile, and ultimately your personal online brand, is your headshot. You’ve mostly likely been inundated with the same advice before: make sure your photo looks professional and avoid selfies and inappropriate photos captured with friends or on other occasions. Whether you already have uploaded a headshot to your profile or had a few taken at our LinkedIn Photo Booth on Nov. 29 and you’re trying to decide which one to use, it’s important to know how you can use your profile photo to benefit your career aspirations. Research shows that your LinkedIn headshot helps employers form perceptions of you before you even meet in person. Photofeeler, a website that allows users to upload photos and see others’ immediate perceptions, conducted a study to investigate the elements that produce the most effective LinkedIn profile photos. The study was “based on over 60,000 ratings of perceived competence, likability, and influence for 800 profile photos” in the database. Each photo was tagged with a long list of characteristics, which allowed Photofeeler to control absolute values. Once the results were analyzed the findings were narrowed down to favorable and unfavorable visual aspects. The results confirmed the following trends:
The psychological conclusions from this study highlight that your physical appearance helps employers determine many of your qualities such as how influential, competent, reliable, hardworking, ambitious, or intelligent you are. If your LinkedIn profile photo does not meet the guidelines in the list above, consider choosing a different one so you’re not hurting your only chance of building a great first impression online.
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