Your company has finally updated everyone’s headshots. The lighting is consistent, the backgrounds match, and your website has a polished, cohesive look.
Then you hire someone new.
A few months later, you hire three more people. Someone else misses the original headshot day. Before long, your carefully coordinated collection of employee headshots starts looking less consistent.
This is a common challenge for growing companies, and it’s much easier to solve when you have a plan in place from the beginning.
At Janel Lee Photography, we photograph corporate teams throughout Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky and help organizations think beyond the initial photography day. Here’s what companies should consider if they want their employee headshots to remain consistent as their team changes.
Why Does Headshot Consistency Matter?
Take a look at the leadership or team page of almost any company’s website and you’ll immediately notice when employee headshots don’t belong together.
One person has a white background. Another was photographed outdoors. Someone’s image is tightly cropped while another employee is shown from the waist up. Lighting, image quality, clothing styles, and even the apparent age of the photographs can vary considerably.
Individually, some of those photographs may be perfectly good headshots. When they’re displayed together, however, the inconsistencies become much more noticeable.
Consistent employee headshots help create a professional visual identity across your website, proposals, marketing materials, internal directories, LinkedIn profiles, and other places where your team is represented.
For companies that hire regularly, consistency should be part of the photography plan from the beginning.
What Makes Corporate Headshots Look Consistent?
A background is only one part of the equation, and only partly important. Let me explain.
To recreate a company’s established headshot style, a photographer may need to consider:
- Background color and material
- Lighting position and quality
- Camera position and angle
- Lens and camera settings
- Distance between the subject and background
- Composition and crop
- Subject positioning
- Overall posing style
- Image dimensions
- Color treatment
- Retouching style
Even relatively small differences can become noticeable when 20 or 30 employee photographs appear next to one another on a company website.
That’s why documenting the photography setup is so important.
What Happens When We Hire Someone After the Original Headshot Day?
This is one of the questions we recommend discussing before your company’s initial headshot session.
If you know your organization is growing, tell your photographer that future employees will need to be added.
We can document the visual and technical elements used to create your company’s headshots so that when a new employee needs to be photographed, we have a reference for recreating the established look.
Depending on the needs of the organization, new hires may be able to come to our Cincinnati studio for their headshot, or we can discuss additional on-site photography when enough new employees need to be photographed.
The important part is having a system in place before the need arises.
Can a New Employee’s Headshot Really Match One Taken Months Ago?
In many situations, yes.
The closer we can reproduce the original photography conditions, the easier it is to maintain a consistent result.
This is one reason working with the same photographer over time can be valuable. We know how the original photographs were created and can refer back to the established specifications.
The goal isn’t necessarily to make every employee look identical. Each person should still look like themselves.
The consistency comes from the elements surrounding the individual — lighting, background, composition, crop, image treatment, and overall photographic style.
When those elements remain consistent, the finished collection can still feel cohesive even when the photographs were created months apart.
Should New Hires Come to the Studio or Should the Photographer Return to Our Office?
That depends largely on how frequently your company hires and how many people need photographs.
If you hire one new employee, having that person come to our Cincinnati studio may be the simplest solution when the established headshot style can be recreated there.
If you’ve added 10 or 15 employees since the original photography day, scheduling another on-site session may make more sense.
For organizations that hire regularly, we can discuss a schedule for periodic headshot updates rather than waiting until the number of missing photographs becomes a problem.
There isn’t one solution that works for every organization. The goal is to create a process that fits the way your company actually hires.
What About Employees Who Miss the Original Headshot Day?
Even the best-planned corporate headshot day will usually have a few people who can’t participate.
Someone gets sick. An executive has an unexpected meeting. An employee is traveling. A remote team member happens to be out of town.
We recommend accounting for this possibility during the initial planning process.
Rather than treating those employees as an afterthought, we can discuss how makeup headshots will be handled before the first photography day even takes place.
This is particularly important for larger organizations where getting every employee in the same place at the same time may simply be unrealistic.
What If Our Employees Work in Different Cities?
Multi-location and remote teams introduce another challenge.
When employees are photographed by different photographers in different cities, perfect consistency can be difficult because the equipment, physical environment, and photographer’s approach may vary.
A company can still improve consistency by establishing clear visual guidelines.
Those guidelines might specify the background, composition, approximate crop, lighting direction, wardrobe expectations, image dimensions, and other characteristics that should remain consistent.
For some organizations, it may also make sense to coordinate photography around company meetings, conferences, leadership retreats, or other occasions when employees from multiple locations will already be together.
If you have a distributed workforce, this is worth discussing early in the planning process.
Should Every Employee Have Exactly the Same Pose?
Usually, no.
Consistency doesn’t require making every person stand at precisely the same angle with exactly the same expression.
In fact, that can sometimes make a team page feel overly rigid.
We want the photographs to share a recognizable visual style while still allowing each employee to look comfortable and natural.
Some people look their best positioned slightly differently than others. Body type, height, clothing, hair, glasses, and individual comfort can all influence how we photograph someone.
Our job is to work within the company’s established visual style while providing individual direction to each person.
What If Our Company Wants to Change Its Headshot Style?
There eventually comes a point when maintaining an old style may no longer make sense.
Your company may rebrand. Your website may be redesigned. Leadership may want a more contemporary look. The existing photographs may simply be several years old.
At that point, updating the entire team may be preferable to continuing to match older photographs.
A company-wide update also provides an opportunity to establish a new photography standard that can then be maintained for future hires.
If you’re already planning a website redesign or major rebrand, it’s worth involving your photographer early enough to make sure the new headshots work with the visual direction of the new site.
How Often Should Companies Update Employee Headshots?
There isn’t a universal expiration date for a professional headshot.
Some companies update everyone on a regular schedule, while others replace photographs as needed.
A practical approach is to periodically review your team page as a whole.
Are some photographs noticeably older than others? Has the company’s brand changed? Are employees using a mixture of professional photographs and casual snapshots? Have enough new people joined that the collection is beginning to feel inconsistent?
Those are usually better indicators that it’s time for an update than simply deciding that every photograph must be replaced after a specific number of years.
Create a Headshot Plan, Not Just a Headshot Day
For a growing company, the initial photography day is only the beginning.
Before photographing your team, it helps to answer a few questions:
- Who will manage headshots internally?
- How will new employees receive a headshot?
- What happens when someone misses the scheduled photography day?
- Can the established look be recreated at the photographer’s studio?
- At what point does it make sense to schedule another on-site session?
- Where are the finished images stored?
- Does your marketing team need specific file dimensions or naming conventions?
- When should the entire company be photographed again?
Answering these questions once can save your HR or marketing team from solving the same problem every time someone joins the organization.
Building a Consistent Corporate Headshot Program in Cincinnati
If your organization is growing, professional headshots shouldn’t become another recurring administrative headache.
A little planning during the initial photography project can make it much easier to add new employees, accommodate people who miss headshot day, and keep your company’s visual presence consistent over time.
At Janel Lee Photography, we work with businesses and organizations throughout Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky to create professional corporate headshots and develop a photography approach that can continue working as their teams change.
Building or updating your company’s headshot program? Learn more about our corporate headshot photography in Cincinnati and how we can create a consistent look for your team now and as your organization grows.
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