How fast do people judge your LinkedIn headshot or Facebook profile photograph?

4 Jan

That’s obviously a really fast response for someone to judge your headshot,

So much for “never judging a book by it’s cover!” And we all know its true!

Watch anybody on a dating sight and watch how quickly they go through the profile photographs - it’s incredibly fast (we will find out why later) there’s even a phrase for it - swipe left, or is it right! One of the two anyhow.

If that’s not your thing go to LinkedIn profiles and see how quickly you can scan the headshots and make an opinion on which one to click.

Pretty quickly I bet.

Ok, lets see why this is and more importantly what we can do about it.

First up a bit of science .

In 2005 at Princeton University Alex Todorov and Janine Willis used timed experiments to see how fast people reacted to a series of faces. The faces were presented to their students as a set of photographs.

Incredibly they found that in less than a 1/10th of a second firm judgements were made as to the persons character, trustability as well as there attractiveness.

There decisions were made so fast they were on a subconscious level.

Really it should come as no surprise, we all make snap judgements especially on peoples appearance. You can find out more on

Princeton Universities website or in one of my favourite books by Malcolm Gladwell “ Blink”. Well worth checking out.

So choose your headshot of profile picture with care. But how?

I know what its like staring at a camera - you just go blank and spin out! As a teacher of photography I have been photographed hundreds and hundreds of times, so I have learnt to deal with it.

And I am going to share with you how you can do it.

Firstly the obvious thing is get a professional photographer to coach and direct you. Yes of course I have to say that! But if you want to do it yourself here’s some bullet points:

Practice by staring at a mirror, really take the time to feel the different muscles in your face. The way you can control your eyes and the way they connected to your mouth.
Try doing some silly faces to get all the muscles in your face relaxed - tension is the enemy here and the camera will pick it up
Next pretend your listening to someone telling an interesting story, or perhaps a time in your life when you felt super confident. This all depends on how you want to be seen by the public.
Finally get in front of the camera, really stare into the lens and visualise talking to yourself of that person again. Then repeat for at least 20 times.
Choose your favourite photograph quickly, go by gut instinct. In other words rely on your subconscious