Headshot examples: 26 that work, and why each one does

A business headshot has one job: make a stranger comfortable putting you in front of their client. The examples below share the traits that do that work. The face is in sharp focus and fills a third of the frame or more, the light is soft and even with no hard shadows under the eyes, and the background is an office or studio that suggests context without demanding attention.

Notice what is missing: no dramatic side lighting, no busy street scenes, no logo walls. Those choices photograph well at full size and fall apart at the sizes a business headshot actually renders, which is a small square in a company directory or an email signature.

LinkedIn renders your photo as a circle 48 pixels wide next to every comment you leave. That single fact decides what a good LinkedIn headshot looks like: the tightest crop of any professional photo, the face filling most of the frame, and enough contrast between subject and background that the circle still reads at a glance.

The two studio examples below survive the circle best. The two street shots trade a little legibility for personality, a reasonable trade for founders and creatives, a poor one for job seekers whose photo will be compared against a column of identical-size rivals.

Real estate is the exception to most headshot rules. The photo appears on yard signs, mailers and the Zillow agent circle, so it has to survive both a foot-wide print and a thumbnail, and it is selling a relationship rather than authority: buyers pick the agent who looks like a pleasant person to spend Saturdays with.

That is why every example below leads with a genuine smile, and why the backgrounds are porches, listed homes and bright offices instead of grey seamless. The full set, and what each setting is for, is on the realtor page.

Legal is the one field where formal beats friendly. Clients bring lawyers their worst problems, and the headshot that wins that trust is composed rather than warm: full business attire, a neutral office or studio background, an expression closer to steady than to smiling.

The examples below would look stiff on a realtor page and exactly right on a firm bio. That contrast is the whole lesson of this page: a good headshot is good for a specific audience, not in the abstract.

An executive headshot travels without you: board pages, press releases, conference programs. It needs presence at full column width, which is why these examples use wider framing and settings with some gravitas, a glass office, a full-length lobby shot, rather than the tight crops that serve LinkedIn.

Keep one formal, neutral-background version in reserve even if your public photo is more relaxed. Journalists will crop, recolor and print whatever you send them, and the plain version is the one that survives that.

Where a CV photo is expected (most of Europe, Latin America and Asia), it prints small on a document, often in black and white. Simple background, tight crop, and clothing one notch more formal than the job are the rules; everything else on this page is optional here.

All four examples below stay inside the convention: plain light background, formal or near-formal attire, mild expression. The variation between them is register, from suit-and-tie for banking down to open collar for tech, not rule-breaking. Note that in the US, UK and Canada the usual answer is no photo at all.