No photo, text only. This is the standard American and Canadian resume: your name, city and state, phone, email, optional profile URL, then standard sections headed "Work Experience," "Education" and "Skills" (CareerOneStop, U.S. Department of Labor, undated). There is no photo, no date of birth, no marital status and no nationality line. Use it unless something specific pushes you elsewhere. The reasoning is not only personal risk but the employer's: the EEOC states that pre-employment information requests should be limited to what is essential for determining job qualification, and that information about race, sex, national origin, age and religion is irrelevant to that determination (EEOC, undated). An EEOC informal discussion letter described candidate photos as something that "could increase the risk of discrimination or the appearance of discrimination" (EEOC, as cited by Capturely, undated). Employers that have internalized that are not neutral about photos — they actively do not want one.
No photo, but a professional profile link. Same document, with one line in the contact block pointing to a profile or portfolio that does carry your headshot. This suits work where people buy you as much as your output: agency sales, recruiting, brokerage, design, photography, consulting. It gives a hiring manager a legitimate route to your face, your recommendations and your samples without putting a photo in front of the first screen. Write the URL in plain text — a customized profile address or a portfolio domain — rather than hiding it behind linked words, so it survives copy-paste into an applicant tracking system. Keep the profile photo consistent with how you present at interview, and make sure the profile's dates and titles match the resume exactly, because a mismatch is read as carelessness.
Photo embedded in the resume. Reserve this for an explicit instruction: a posting that says "attach a resume with photo," a casting or talent portal with that field, or a client in a market where it is standard. If you must, place the image inline at the top of the first page rather than in a header, text box, table cell or shape — those containers are exactly where resume parsers lose content, and losing content means losing the work history underneath. Keep the image modest, roughly 1 to 1.25 inches wide, and keep the rest of the layout plain and single-column. Then send a second, photo-free version to every other employer. Treat the photo version as a special-purpose file, not your default.
Separate headshot file alongside a text resume. In acting, modeling, dance, broadcast and voice work the headshot is the submission, and the resume is the attachment to it. The convention is a professional headshot as its own image file, with credits, training, skills and physical details on the performance resume — not a corporate resume with a face pasted into the corner. Follow whatever dimensions, file format and naming the agent, casting site or client specifies, because portals reject files that miss their spec. The resume part still obeys ordinary rules: real text, standard headings, and never a scan or screenshot, since CareerOneStop warns a scanned image will not be recognized by an ATS (CareerOneStop, U.S. Department of Labor, undated).
Photo CV for markets where it is expected. If you are applying to a role based in Germany, Austria or Switzerland, a resume photo is traditionally expected there, while in the United States and Canada photos are broadly discouraged for anti-discrimination compliance reasons (Capturely, undated). Canada is firmly in the second camp: Novoresume notes that Canadian human rights legislation discourages employers from asking for a photo as part of a job application because it can lead to discrimination, and encourages anonymous hiring processes (Novoresume, undated). Practice also varies by employer within any one country — a Berlin startup staffed by international hires may use a blind screening process while a traditional firm down the road still expects the photo. If you cannot tell, check the employer's careers page instructions or ask the recruiter directly, and keep two clearly named files so you never attach the wrong one.
