is it OK to look very different from your online photos?

[purlewe]

A reader writes on Ask a Manager:

I’ve started a new job (thanks to lots of great advice on negotiating job offers from your site!) which involves a lot of networking with partners within and outside of my organization, and because I’m new I’m meeting people for the first time. In preparation for a scheduled meeting, I try to do some research on the company and the work my contact does, so that I can make the most of our meeting time. Because of Covid, all my meetings are now virtual, usually via video conference, but hopefully some day I’ll be meeting people in person.

A couple weeks ago, I had a situation that really threw me for a loop and I can’t stop stewing about it. I’d done a lot of research and reading about the individual I was meeting with, and there happened to be a few photos of the person on their organization’s website (I am talking about the company website, not social media or broader web-stalking).

When the meeting started (we were both working from home), the person looked nothing like their photos, to the point where I started to have a mini-panic and thought I’d prepared for the wrong meeting or somehow was meeting with the wrong person. I slowly realized that I was talking with the same person, but that their physical appearance and attire choice had changed quite a bit. It was distracting — thinking I’d made a mistake and trying to dig through my memory to make sure I was in the right meeting — and the situation made it hard to focus on the conversation at hand.

So that started me thinking about whether there’s any etiquette or general guidance for how often you should be updating your “official” online presence photos, if they exist. On one hand, I feel like if you’re going to put something out there, it should be reasonably true to what you look like and not overly edited or really out of date … but on the other hand, some things are ephemeral (like hair color/style, facial hair on men, even some weight gain/loss) and you don’t always want to be updating every time you get a haircut or grow a mustache. Also, in some circumstances, I could see a situation where a physical change is happening (like a gender transition) where someone isn’t ready to make it “website official.”

What’s that the right thing to do here from an individual level, but also from a managerial level if you oversee staff who who have official photos on company websites? I’m certainly not going to bring up to a fellow networking contact that I think they should update their online presence, but now I want to make sure I’m not putting someone else in a position where they don’t recognize me!

Well, there’s what people should do and then there’s how the people around them should respond to it, and those can be two different things.

As a general rule, you should indeed want your online photos to look reasonably enough like yourself that people won’t panic and think they’re meeting with the wrong person.

And that’s a guideline with a lot of room in it! It doesn’t mean people need to update their photo every year or when their hair changes or every time they go up or down 10 pounds. It really just means “be generally recognizable” (since otherwise, what’s the point of having the photo up at all?).

But as a manager, I’d tread pretty lightly around telling people when they need an updated photo. I could see saying something like, “I just realized our photo of you on the website is from when you first started 15 years ago — can we get a more recent one at some point?” But if it’s a photo from within, say, five or even ten years and the person looks different because they’ve gained/lost weight or gone bald or similar … I’d leave it alone. I just don’t think it matters enough to be worth putting such a focus on the person’s appearance, particularly when those changes can be sensitive areas. Unless there’s evidence that it’s regularly confusing people in ways that matter (something like students not recognizing an assigned teacher), I’d put more weight on giving people the comfort of managing their own online photos.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

Oh this one pissed me off. Unless there are actual reasons why do we need online photos at all?! There was another letter, where an overweight woman was hired during the pandemic and her boss loved her performance from a distance, then met her in person and obviously hated her for being fat, which shows how much good it can do to not be judged by one's appearance.

[melannen]

Right?? I read way down in the comments on this yesterday until I got very frustrated that nobody was pointing out that the obvious solution is to not require employee photos, which you should not be doing anyway. There is no actual use case for them except enabling discrimination.

Unless it's high security enough that you need a photo ID badge, in which case you definitely shouldn't be putting the photos online.

[sathari]

I said this to minoanmiss above, but, yes, this, so much this. (I admit I miss the days when the internet was primarily for text-based communication just in general, but this specific version of "must have pictures of everything" is especially bad.)

[sathari]

YES YES YES YES YES YES SO MUCH YES THIS. I didn't put this in bajillion-point font with more sparkly text effects than existed in all of MySpace, but SO MUCH THIS. Stop with the damn photos already.

[ioplokon]

I will say, as a job seeker interviewing for remote jobs & trying to sort out scams (I have actually had people impersonate legitimate companies), it is somewhat useful to be able to recognize your interviewer from official company photos and press coverage. As an alternative to photos, companies can provide official job listings on their site as well as phone numbers or contact info for HR & post a notice if they are being impersonated (which one of the places that was used to try to scam me did).

I don't see what the need for it on the interviewee side would be whatsoever.

[xenacryst]

::considers making this ^^ their actual photo at work::

[feldman]

It's a videocall, not a dating app assignation. When you 'research' the person, maybe also check out their qualifications, their role in their org, the small talk tidbits peppered in their LinkedIn or company bio.

Maybe examine why you feel bait and switched by something so nunya.

[azurelunatic]

As a faceblind person, I appreciate photos that look something like the person so I can study them enough to actually recognize them, but I have also recognized people off of picrew equivalents before picrew was a thing. I worked at a place with security badges and an internal social network, and I was lucky when the internal social network pictures were a recent picture of their face (as opposed to a kitchen fire, a clip art figure with a magnifying glass, or a ten-pixel high blur on top of a very impressive mountain, thinking of three specific people). When I maintained a "yearbook" for my reception job, the photos were a) not online, and b) so my fellow receptionists could recognize people who were authorized visitors but not employees, such as vendors.

In a work-configured video call, everybody is going to have some kind of label on their video account, and it ought to have some relationship to the person's work name. In a sufficiently large in-person meetup venue, I would expect some sort of name label. In a 1:1 in person public meetup, I would expect identification such as "I will be near the potted plant carrying a neon rainbow tiedye bag with blue straps."

[shirou]

My company doesn't have employee photos on its website, so when I'm meeting somebody new, I don't know what they will look like ahead of time. It has never been a problem.

[green_grrl]

As many, many people in the comments pointed out, Zoom labels your name. The company should just make clear that you should be logged in and have some form of your real name in meetings (versus just initials or a pseud) and problem solved.

[melannen]

I suspect LW's anxiety wasn't the sort that would be settled by that; if I was looking for Latasha Jones, and I was on a video call with someone labelled Latasha Jones who didn't look like the Latasha Jones I expected, I would be nervous that I had called the wrong Latasha Jones. (No, adding a job title too wouldn't help, I would just be nervous that I had mixed up the job titles.)

I mean, the obvious way to fix this is to say "Hi, I am [X] and I had an meeting scheduled at [Z] with [Y], am I in the right place?" and let them tell you. We managed with that for centuries.