The Business Case for Updating Your Team's Headshots
It’s understandable that it’s not fixed as frequently as it should be, but more often than not when I look at a company’s team page it’s a patchwork of professional photos, selfies, photos taken in the office on an iPhone, and one taken on holiday with the background cut out.
This is a universal problem. It's partly because the budget sits with someone who hasn't looked at that page in months, and who will reasonably ask: do we really need to spend money on team headshots right now?
This post is the answer to that question, with a reason other than “it’ll just look nicer”. If you're the person who has to make the case internally, then this is the reasoning.
First impressions happen before anyone reads a word
When a potential client interacts with anyone in your company for the first time through LinkedIn, your about or team page on your website, or a proposal with your headshot on it, a judgement is made of them and your company far quicker and more definitively than a lot of people realise.
Princeton psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov found that people form a judgement about how trustworthy, competent and likeable a face is in around a tenth of a second - about 100 milliseconds. Giving people longer to look didn't change the verdict, it just made them more confident in the one they'd already reached.
Similarly, another study done by Todorov showed that snap judgements of someone’s face (rated on perceived competence) was able to predict the winner of a US Senate race 70% of the time.
Before a prospect has read your carefully written bios, your case studies or your tagline, they've already formed an impression of your people from the photographs alone. And it's not a fleeting impression, it's the lens through which they see everything else associated with you/your company.
Your photos are as much a part of the sales process as any of the copy or other images on your website. Even more so for any companies trying to push thought leadership on LinkedIn, where you might have thousands of people a day coming across one of your employees and their profile photo is the first thing they’ll look at.
The quiet cost of not changing
One of the reasons this is so easy to deprioritise is that nobody ever emails to tell you your photos put them off.
A prospect who finds your team page slightly off, mismatched, dated, a bit amateur, doesn't write in to say so and maybe doesn’t even realise that was the clincher. Instead, they just quietly go with the firm whose people looked like a safe pair of hands. The cost is there, but it's invisible, which is why it loses the budget battle to the things that scream more loudly for attention.
For a business that wins work on trust, which is almost every business, that's not a small thing to wave away.
A team that looks like they work together
When every person’s team headshot is the same style with consistent lighting, background and framing, your team looks like one organisation, who cares about how they present themselves to their audience.
When the team page is a collage of different eras, backgrounds, phone cameras and crops, it signals the opposite, whether you mean it to or not. People extend that impression to other areas of the business.
Consistency is quietly one of the most persuasive things a team page can have.
Your people are part of your recruitment strategy
It isn't only clients doing this, candidates research you in the same way.
If it looks like you cut corners on the team page then it’s easy to assume you cut corners elsewhere. If a candidate can tell that you invest in your staff through professional photos for the whole team, then it’s easy to assume that you invest in your staff in other ways.
The best candidates have plenty of options, you want to make sure you’re giving yourself every edge to get the best talent possible to grow your business.
Possible AI shortcut
It may be that someone suggests AI headshots.
I’ve written about why AI headshots are a false economy before, but the short version is that the whole point of updating your team's photos is to earn trust faster. AI headshots in most cases do the opposite by showing a clearly false view of your team and raising the question of “if you use AI in that part of the business, where else do you use it that’s less visible?”
Is there a time cost?
The objection that usually comes next is disruption, the assumption that photographing a whole team means a logistical headache.
Now I won’t lie, it definitely can be, the idea of getting everyone in the office on one day and trying to work around different start/finish times, meeting, appointments etc can be a lot, especially for larger teams.
Typically with larger groups I end up doing one larger session of a few (maybe up to 5) hours and then a shorter top up session a week or so later. This takes a lot of the pressure off of everyone having to be in on the same day and available at certain times and ensures that you actually manage to get everyone with the same photos.
If you'd like to see how that's structured, the detail is on my corporate team headshots in London page.
How to make the case internally
Team headshots aren't a vanity expense. They're a brand asset that touches almost every client interaction you have: the website, every team member's LinkedIn, proposals and pitch decks, email signatures, press and award entries. They sit at the front of your sales process and they last for years. Measured against how many times each photo is seen by someone deciding whether to trust you, the cost per use is tiny.
So the real question isn't "can we justify spending on headshots." It's the reverse: can we justify having our people represent us with photos that undercut them in the first tenth of a second a prospect sees them? Framed that way, it stops being a nice-to-have and becomes what it actually is which is a small, high-leverage investment in building trust with your clients when it’s most needed.
If you've read this far, you've more or less built the case already. When you're ready to put real numbers against it for your team, take a look at how I run corporate team shoots — or get in touch for a quote tailored to your headcount.