Your engineers do not want their faces on your careers page
A quarter of your team quietly dreads the photo day email. What they are worried about, and the fix that costs less than a photographer.
Noa Ellery, art director
Privacy · · Updated · 8 min read
Ask a room of engineers to send a headshot and a quarter of them go quiet. Some do not want their face on a page that anyone can scrape. Some have a reason they would rather not explain. A few just hate being photographed. None of them are being difficult. In Europe, data protection regulators rarely accept an employee's consent to their employer as freely given, so a photo people feel pressed into is shaky ground.
Why they say no
A photograph of a face is personal data. Once it is online it can be copied, searched and matched in ways the person never agreed to, and the careers page is the most public place a company puts it. That is the worry, even when nobody says it in the all-hands. A drawing carries none of that, because it was never a photograph in the first place.
“A photo is a copy of your face. A drawing is a likeness you chose to send.”
That is the fix. Everyone on the team gets an avatar drawn by hand in one style, from one photo they choose to send, or from a photo they already have on Slack. Nobody sits for anything. Nobody opts out in front of colleagues. The page looks like one company, and it costs less than a photographer for a morning.
One person can order for the whole team in about four minutes, without a consent form, without a photo day, and without asking anyone twice.