Should you put a photo on your CV?

It depends entirely on where you are applying, and getting it wrong costs you the application in both directions.

There is no universal answer, and confident advice in either direction is describing one country's convention as though it were a rule.

Where a photo is expected

Germany, Austria, Switzerland. A professional headshot is conventional and its absence is noticed. German CVs traditionally include more personal detail than English-speaking ones.

France, Spain, Italy, much of continental Europe. Common, though becoming less universal at larger international employers.

The Gulf — UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar. Expected, frequently alongside nationality, date of birth and passport details.

Parts of Asia, including Bangladesh, India, China, Japan and South Korea, where photographs are common on locally-formatted CVs.

Where a photo works against you

United States. Strongly discouraged. Many employers discard CVs with photos before reading them — not out of preference, but because keeping a document showing an applicant's race, age and gender creates discrimination exposure.

United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand. The same reasoning. Recruitment agencies here routinely strip photos before passing a CV to a client.

The practical argument, separate from the legal one

A photo occupies space that could carry an achievement, and it is one more element that can break a parse. Some applicant tracking systems handle embedded images badly, and a CV whose header is an image is a CV whose name cannot be read.

If you include one

A plain background, good light, professional clothing
Head and shoulders, looking at the camera
Recent, and recognisably you
Not a cropped wedding photo, and not a passport scan

And strip the metadata. Phone photographs routinely carry the GPS coordinates of where they were taken, which is not something to attach to a job application. Our builder re-encodes uploaded photos and removes that data automatically.

The default we chose, and why

The photo toggle in the builder is off by default. Not because a photo is wrong, but because no default is right everywhere, and the cost of wrongly including one is higher than the cost of wrongly omitting one. An employer in Munich will not reject you for a missing photo. An employer in Chicago may well discard you for having one.

If you apply in both markets, keep two versions. It takes a minute.