1. Job searching

On average, people will have ten to fifteen jobs in their lifetime. 92% of employers look to social media during their recruitment campaign. Your potential employers will be searching the popular social media sites trying to put together a picture of who you are. The first thing they find is your profile picture. Does your profile picture send the right message about you? Does it convey to potential employers the message that you wish it to convey? It’s a great idea during your job hunting stage to use the same professional profile picture on all of your social media accounts. This way, the potential employer can easily recognise you. Make it easy for them to find you and build the picture that you are the person they are looking for.

2. To stand out from the crowd

Have you ever searched LinkedIn for a person you are interested in? Have you ever encountered this profile picture? People are 14 times more likely to click on your LinkedIn profile, if you have a headshot. Too many LinkedIn profiles have this default profile picture and when you are scrolling through the lists, people who have a picture stand out from the crowd. People who have professional pictures automatically draw the eye away from everyone else on the list. Stand out from the crowd and you will be seen.

Social media today interviewed recruiters, and when asked what made them not click through on certain people, having no profile picture was one of the reasons cited.

3. For your business card

A study done at the University of Texas (Metcalf 1997) found that people remember 10 percent of what they read however, they remember 50 percent of what they see and hear. If your business card has a visual reminder of you, you are more likely to be remembered by people you are networking with than if you had just your name and details.

4. You have 7 seconds to make a first impression, what impression are you making?

When people see a picture of you, they will make their first impression within seconds of seeing it. You must make sure the picture you are putting forward is your best one. A cropped image from a wedding might be a nice photo of you, but it fools no-one. Everyone knows it’s a cropped photo from a wedding! It says that you aren’t very serious about the message you are putting out there and there is absolutely no room to make it about your brand.

5. People do business with people

People are more likely to hire you if they can see the actual person behind the business. Once a person sees a picture of a person, they automatically start building trust with your business.

6. It’s such a cheap investment

For as little as $200, you can have a professional headshot that reflects your brand and speaks the message you want to convey!