A photo on your CV: yes or no, and how to choose it

On a CV, the photo is seen before the reading starts. It can make your application feel more human, or raise a doubt in a second. This guide covers what the law allows, when a photo genuinely helps, how to take a good one with your phone, and what screening software does with it (nothing).

The rule in France: never compulsory

Nothing is compulsory on a CV in France: not your age, not your family situation, not a photo, which service-public.fr lists only as an optional extra, depending on what the employer asks for. The information requested from a candidate must relate directly to the job. And while an employer is free to turn down an application on the strength of the CV, it is forbidden to do so on discriminatory grounds: physical appearance, age, origin, sex and religious beliefs are among them (see the sources at the bottom of the page).

In practice, that means it is your call. A job ad may ask for a photo, but nothing obliges you to include one, and a recruiter is not allowed to pick or reject you on your looks. What matters is that the decision is deliberate rather than automatic.

When it helps, when it hurts

The simplest rule fits in one sentence: a good photo, or no photo. An average photo never works in your favour.

• It helps in customer-facing jobs (sales, reception, hotels, restaurants, property, consulting), when your application lands directly with a person, and when you want to be remembered after a job fair or an interview.
• It hurts when it is poor (an arm's-length selfie, a party photo, a face cut out of a group shot), when it no longer looks like you, and when it clashes with the role: beachwear for a law firm.
• It is pointless in sectors where nobody expects one (tech, research, large companies with anonymised screening) and on CVs for a number of countries abroad, where it is discouraged: see our guide to CVs for a job abroad.
• Leaving it out sometimes protects you: if you have reason to think your age or your appearance might count against you, let your track record speak for itself. For experienced profiles, our guide to CVs after 50 goes into this.

The 6 things that make a good photo

These are the ones the site's AI checks when you submit a photo, in this order. They are about the picture, never about your looks.

1. Framing: your face and the top of your shoulders, centred, neither too far away nor cut off at the forehead. No cropped group photo, no full-length shot.
2. Background: plain and quiet (a light wall, a door, the sky), with no furniture, plant, poster or passer-by behind you.
3. Lighting: your face lit from the front or at three quarters, with no harsh shadow, no backlight and no flash that washes out your skin.
4. Outfit: what people wear in the job you are after, one notch above the everyday: more formal in finance or law, more relaxed in the creative trades or crafts.
5. Expression: eyes on the lens, an open face, a slight smile. Neither frozen nor laughing out loud.
6. Sharpness: a sharp, high-resolution image, not a pixelated zoom on an old holiday photo.

One last point ties them all together, and the AI judges it too: the fit with your career. A very corporate studio shot on a graphic designer's CV, or a hiking fleece on a finance director's, tell a different story from your text. The photo should confirm your CV's headline, not contradict it.

Taking it yourself, with a phone

1. Pick the moment: daytime, facing a window, out of direct sunlight. Natural light from the front is the most flattering and the simplest.
2. Pick the background: a plain, light wall, a step or two behind you so it stays slightly out of focus.
3. Have someone take it rather than stretching your arm out: phone at eye level, face and shoulders with a little room around them, several takes.
4. Dress for the job, not for the photo: what you would wear to the interview.
5. Edit as little as possible: crop, straighten, brighten a touch. No filter, no skin smoothing, no AI-swapped background: it shows, and it raises the question of what else you might be hiding.
6. Get it judged before you send it: someone in the trade, or our AI's feedback on your photo, which runs through these criteria and the fit with your career.

What ATS robots do with it: nothing

Applicant tracking systems read text. To them, an image does not exist: the photo is neither a plus nor a minus, it is simply ignored. The only risk comes from what sits around it. If your photo sits in a banner that also holds your email and phone number as an image, the robot cannot find your contact details; our “Detectable contact details” criterion asks for exactly this: “Email and phone written as text in the body of the CV (not in an image or a header).” And a CV exported entirely as an image (a screenshot, a scan) has no text left at all: “A PDF made from a scan or an image has no text: the robot sees a blank page.” More in our guide to ATS robots.

Change the photo without redoing the CV

Is your CV already done and only the photo bothers you? On Change your CV photo, you pick an image from your phone: it is cropped in your browser to the proportions of the old one, then placed in your PDF in the same spot, with the same mask (round, square or rounded). Nothing else moves. For a Word CV, or to remove the photo, “My structure” redraws the CV with or without it. Without an account, nothing is kept; with one, the CV with the new photo is kept as a new CV, next to the old one. The rest of the CV, headline, profile, keywords, goes through the CV analysis, which tells you what to fix word for word.