The short answer
In the US, UK, Canada, Ireland and Australia, leave it off. In much of continental Europe, Latin America and parts of Asia, a photo is conventional and its absence is noticed. The answer depends on where the job is, not where you are.
What matters most
- The country the job is in decides, not the country you live in or hold a passport from.
- In the US and much of the anglophone world, a photo can cause your application to be filtered out for legal-risk reasons.
- In much of continental Europe and several Asian and Latin American markets, a photo is normal and expected.
- When a photo is expected, treat it as a business portrait, not a social media picture.
Why the two conventions exist
The split is not about taste. It comes from how discrimination law is enforced and from what employers do to protect themselves from it.
In the United States, employment discrimination on the basis of characteristics including race, colour, national origin, sex, religion, age and disability is prohibited, and the responsible agency publishes its position on what employers may and may not consider β see the EEOC guidance on prohibited practices. A photograph puts several protected characteristics in front of the decision-maker before anything else is read. That does not make the photograph illegal, and candidates are not doing anything wrong by including one. What it does is create evidence risk for the employer: if a rejected candidate later alleges discrimination, the employer has to explain why they had that information at all. A common institutional response is a policy that resumes with photographs are removed or returned unread. That is the practical reason to leave it off, and it is a reason about their process rather than your appearance.
Where a photo is expected, tolerated and avoided
Conventions shift, and within any country individual employers vary β international firms often apply their headquarters' norms wherever they hire. Treat this as a starting point and check the employer's own careers page, which frequently states a preference outright.
| Market | Convention | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| United States, Canada | Leave it off | Widely discouraged. Some systems and employers reject documents containing photographs as a matter of policy. |
| United Kingdom, Ireland | Leave it off | Not expected. Many public-sector employers use anonymised shortlisting where identifying details are stripped before review. |
| Australia, New Zealand | Leave it off | Follows the same convention as the UK. |
| Germany, Austria, Switzerland | Commonly included | Long-standing convention, though anti-discrimination law has softened it. A professional portrait is the norm where one is used. |
| France, Spain, Italy, Portugal | Commonly included | Widespread but not universal, and less consistent in international companies. |
| Nordic countries, Netherlands | Optional | Genuinely mixed. Either choice is unremarkable. |
| Japan, South Korea, China | Usually expected | Often on a prescribed form with specified photograph dimensions. Follow the local template exactly. |
| Much of Latin America, Middle East | Commonly included | Frequently expected, with local variation by sector. |
The practical costs, beyond the convention
Even setting the legal-risk question aside, a photograph has design consequences that apply everywhere.
- It consumes prime space. A portrait large enough to be worth including occupies a substantial part of the top of page one β the area a reader looks at first and the place your strongest evidence should be.
- Parsers cannot read it. An image contributes nothing to keyword matching, and on some layouts a large image at the top pushes the text a parser needs further down or into a region it handles badly.
- It creates an alignment problem. Photographs are usually placed by floating them over the page, which is exactly the technique most likely to move when the document is opened elsewhere.
- It invites a judgement you cannot control. Once a face is on the page, some fraction of the reader's reaction is to the face rather than the work, and that reaction is not one you can edit.
If you are applying somewhere a photo is expected
Then include one, and treat it as a piece of business documentation rather than a picture of yourself.
- 1Use a plain background
A neutral wall in even light. No holiday scenery, no bar, no visible other people, no cropped-out arm on your shoulder.
- 2Dress as you would for the interview
One notch more formal than the office's daily norm. The photograph should be consistent with the role you are applying for.
- 3Frame it head and shoulders
Face clearly visible, looking at the camera, a natural expression. Full-length shots and dramatic angles both read as a portfolio picture rather than an application.
- 4Keep it small and square to the page
Roughly passport-sized, aligned to the header block, with the same margins as everything else. It should look placed, not pasted.
- 5Check the export
Open the exported PDF and confirm the image has not moved, blurred or been compressed into mush. Image handling differs between programs more than people expect.
The version of this question that actually matters
Almost everyone asking about the photo is really asking a different question: how do I stand out. A picture is an appealing answer because it is easy and immediate. It is also the weakest available answer, because it competes on something no employer is hiring for. What genuinely differentiates one resume from forty others is specific, checkable evidence β a number, a scale, a before and after. Our guide on quantifying achievements is a more productive place to spend the same effort.
Where your face does belong
LinkedIn, and any professional network profile. There the photograph is expected, the norms are global rather than national, and its absence genuinely reduces engagement with your profile. That is the right home for the good portrait you had taken β not the resume you send to a US or UK employer. A recruiter who wants to see you will look you up in any case, which is another way of saying the photograph is not achieving anything on the document itself.
One structural point if you do use one: of the seventy-two layouts in our template gallery, only a handful include a photograph frame, and they are deliberately the minority. The default across the gallery is a text-only header, because that is what suits the market most of our readers are applying into. If you need a photograph layout, choose one of the few built for it rather than dropping an image onto a layout that was not, which is where the alignment and export problems come from.
Questions people actually ask
Should I put a photo on my resume in the United States?
No. It is not expected, it takes space that should carry evidence, and some employers have policies of discarding applications containing photographs in order to limit their own discrimination exposure. There is no upside to offset that risk.
Is it illegal to put a photo on a resume?
No. Nothing prevents a candidate from including one. The restrictions in law apply to what employers may consider when making hiring decisions, which is why many of them prefer not to receive photographs in the first place.
Which countries expect a CV photo?
A photograph is conventional in much of continental Europe, including Germany, Austria, France, Spain and Italy, and in many Asian markets such as Japan, South Korea and China, where an official form often specifies the dimensions. Latin America and parts of the Middle East also commonly expect one.
I am applying from abroad β whose convention do I follow?
The convention of the country the job is in. A German applicant applying to a New York office should send a photo-free resume, and an American applying to a Munich office should consider including one. The employer reads it through their local norms, not yours.
What if a recruiter asks me for a photo?
If the request is for a specific, stated reason such as a visitor pass or a client-facing profile after an offer, that is routine. If it arrives unprompted at the application stage from a source you cannot verify, treat it with the same caution as any other unusual request for personal information.
