Should you put a photo on a CV?

There is no global answer, and anyone who gives you one is describing their own country. In some places a photo on a CV is a signal that you did not do your research; in others its absence is. The deciding factor is where the job is — and where the convention is shifting, which direction it is shifting in.

Where a photo is not wanted

In the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, the common practice is no photo. The reason is legal and cultural: employers there are subject to anti-discrimination law covering characteristics that a photo reveals — race, age, sex, sometimes religion — and many have hiring policies that require CVs with photos to be set aside or the photo removed, so that a later decision cannot be challenged as having been influenced by it. A photo on a CV for a US or UK employer is therefore not merely unnecessary; it can create a problem for the recruiter, and it marks the candidate as unfamiliar with local practice. The same logic usually applies to date of birth, marital status and nationality, which are also left off in these countries.

Where a photo is common or expected

In Germany, Austria and Switzerland a professional photograph on the CV (Lebenslauf) has long been standard, though it has been formally optional since anti-discrimination legislation in the 2000s and its use is slowly declining, especially in large and international firms. In France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium and Greece a photo is common and generally accepted, without being obligatory. In Turkey a photo is customary, and so it is across much of the Middle East, where date of birth and nationality are often expected too. In Japan the standard rirekisho form has a designated photo box and a formal photograph is expected; South Korea and China are similar, with a photo widely expected. In much of Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia a photo is common. In the Netherlands and the Nordic countries a photo is optional and neither its presence nor its absence draws comment.

The direction of travel

The trend in most places where a photo has been customary is away from it, driven by anti-discrimination law, by international employers applying one policy across countries, and by anonymised or "blind" recruitment pilots that remove name, photo and age before CVs are screened. Progress is uneven: a German family-owned company may still expect a photo while a German subsidiary of a US group may strip it on receipt. Where convention is in flux, a photo is rarely penalised and its absence is rarely penalised either; the cost of guessing wrong is small. Where convention is settled — no photo in the US and UK, photo on a Japanese rirekisho — the cost of ignoring it is higher. If you are unsure, look at how the employer presents its own staff and job postings, or ask the recruiter directly; it is a normal question.

If you do include one

A CV photo is a professional portrait, not a social media picture: head and shoulders, plain background, facing the camera, neutral or lightly smiling expression, dressed as you would for the interview, recent enough to be recognisable. It sits at the top, usually top right, small — the size of a passport photo, not a banner. Whatever tool you use, keep the photo as a separate image and never let it carry text — name, title or contact details — because a parser discards images and would lose that text. Keep a version of your CV without the photo as well, for applications to countries and companies where it is not wanted; it should be the same document minus one picture, not a different layout.

Photos and tracking systems

A parser extracts text and discards images, so a photo neither helps nor hurts the machine reading; what it affects is the human reading, and the employer's policy. The one technical caution is not to make the photo carry anything a parser should read — a name overlaid on the image, contact details in a graphic banner beside it — because that text will be lost. The ATS check in the app does not flag a photo either way, since whether one belongs is a question about the country and the employer, not about parsing. It does check that your name and contact details are present as real text, which is the part a photo layout most often gets wrong.