How’d that go?
More often than not, when I ask clients to do this, their face does a very specific thing. Somewhere between a wince and a laugh. Because there it is -the shot from a work function circa several years ago. The one where you’re mid-sentence, mid-munch, holding a wine or a beer and you’ve been ‘surprised’ by the photographer. Or that headshot from many years ago, that first day at a new company in Melbourne and the security guard was still learning how to use his new iPhone. Your face is a little bit orange and a little bit wider from the down low shoot up style.
In addition to the security guard indirectly determining how you will be seen for years to come, you’re also at the mercy of the algorithm on this one because you don’t choose the headshot that represents you online. You think you do because you picked the one on your website or LinkedIn. But every podcast producer, conference organiser and journalist, who has a deadline to meet isn’t visiting your website. They’re googling your name and grabbing whatever image loads first. The algorithm is choosing and it tends to pick whatever’s ranked highest, which is often whatever’s oldest or most tagged by someone else. Or it chooses the wrong person altogether!
So let’s just say that a bio photo of you ends up on the event page as one of the keynote speakers. The audience forms a picture of you before seeing you up on stage and it’s too late to change it.
Then you walk out.
And for those first ninety seconds, half the room isn’t quite listening — they’re doing quiet maths. Is that… him? Her? The person on the screen and the person on the stage don’t quite match, and it’s disconcerting. I went to one conference where the speaker must have clocked what was happening, turned and looked at himself up on the screen. He then proceeded to poke fun of himself saying to the audience ‘This is what happens to you when you have 2 kids under the age of 4 and don’t sleep for 3 years.’ The photo was clearly about 20 years old. He did an amazing job of recovering and quickly building rapport, but you really don’t want it to come to that in the first place. It’s an unnecessary distraction.
I see this disconnect constantly and not just with speakers. The exec being introduced to a new board. The founder a journalist is profiling. The prospect who is quietly vetting you before that discovery call. Somewhere, a photo is doing a job on your behalf right now. You just need to make sure it’s the right one – which is to represent the version of you that you want people to see.
The good news: old photos only surface because there’s nothing fresher and stronger to outrank them. That’s genuinely the whole problem and it’s a fixable one. Get some current, honest, well-lit headshot images actually circulating — website, LinkedIn, wherever people go looking — and those become what surfaces instead.
This is how you wrestle control back from the algorithm – back from the machines.