Your engineers do not want their faces on your careers page

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, and under GDPR none of them can be made to sit for a photo they have not freely agreed to.

Why they say no

A photograph is biometric data. It can be matched, searched and reused 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 photograph is biometric data. An illustration is a drawing. Legally, that is not a small distinction.”

That is the fix. Everyone on the team gets a portrait drawn 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.