LinkedIn is a powerful tool for professionals. Not only can you connect with other like-minded professionals—building your network and becoming more prominent in your field—but you can also use the site to help find a new job.
If a new career is your goal, then first impressions are everything, and your headshot will be one of the first parts of you that potential recruiters or employers will see. You can have the best resume under the sun, but if your first foot through the door is a poorly lit selfie taken with your six-year-old iPhone, then you’ll have far less of a chance of getting noticed and subsequently hired. That’s why a high-quality headshot is so important.
Sure, maybe you have a friend who lives close by with a great camera who can at least provide something better than a selfie, and you can probably squeeze by with that. Otherwise, you can pay for professional headshots to be taken, but that can cost hundreds of dollars, if not more.
If the options mentioned above aren’t available to you, then what recourse do you have? As it turns out, you can leverage AI to create a headshot for LinkedIn, and it’s relatively painless.
Enter the World of AI
It’s been a wild ride watching the rise of AI over the past few years. Most technologies take maybe a decade or two to evolve the way that AI has in the past five years alone. Today, AI has found its way into many facets of life, from the apps on our phones to the content on the internet.
Naturally, this has also led to plenty of web-based apps that you can use to create various types of images and videos, including—you guessed it—headshots for LinkedIn. So, what exactly do you need to do to create such images? Let’s dive in.
Important Considerations for Your AI Headshots for LinkedIn
Regardless of whether you use Portrait Pal or any other AI tool, the process is surprisingly painless, but to create the best professional headshot possible, there are a few key factors to keep in mind:
Pick your service
While there’s a bevy of tools available online, they’re not all created equally. Many of them can create lifelike headshots, but if you’re specifically trying to create headshots for LinkedIn, then the more professional, the better.
The level of professionalism you need for your photos will naturally vary depending on your industry. So, do a bit of research, review some of the best headshot generators out there, and pick the one that matches your needs and style.
Consider pricing
Not only are AI headshot generators significantly cheaper than having professional photos taken, but the various services out there offer strategic pricing to make the process even simpler. Some, like Portrait Pal, even allow you to generate a free headshot to sample what your pictures might look like.
Outside of that, most services have a few different pricing tiers, with each one offering more headshot options—not necessarily better quality images. So, in most cases, it’ll be pretty easy to find a cost that works well with whatever your budget might be.
Select your photos
This is your opportunity to put all those selfies to use—the more, the merrier. For the AI models to truly nail your likeness, the generator needs as much material as it can, from a host of different angles and outfits. Avoid adding any duplicates or images that are too similar, as doing so can create more biased results.
Covering up your face will also understandably cause issues with AI image generators, but makeup and glasses are okay. Although here, you do want to be consistent, so do your makeup as you typically would each day, and if you have several pairs of glasses, pick the ones you like the most.
Different services have different image requirements; some will generate images based on just four or five photos, and some require over twelve. Typically, though, somewhere in the range of 16 to 20 will suit you well.
Creating Your Headshots
Once you have all your proverbial ducks in a row, the time has come to generate your headshots. So, let’s break it down step by step:
Sign up for your chosen service
This can vary from service to service: some allow you to simply sign up with an email and password to get started, others will allow you to also log in with Google or even Discord, and yet others still will require you to sign up using your payment info, too. No matter what, you’ll be logged in and ready to go in no time.
Upload your photos
Take the batch of photos you’ve collected, which we described in more detail above, and upload it to the site. Usually, you can just drag and drop all the files into a window, or just find and select them.
Customize your images
This next step can vary a lot depending on which service you choose, and sometimes you can customize the output before you upload your photos, but generally, these two steps come next in most situations. The best AI headshot generators with the most professional results all make this process fairly painless.
The customization options can be vast, too, which is great, because, depending on your line of work, the style of your LinkedIn headshot might vary greatly. If you’re a real estate agent, you probably don’t want a headshot that depicts you in a corporate setting. Similarly, chefs might want to have a headshot that features them in a kitchen wearing a uniform.
Many headshot generators will let you simply select one of the aforementioned presets, from real estate agent to chef to doctor, as well as teacher—and many other professions—to help make those LinkedIn headshots a breeze.
A few AI apps even provide you with a text prompt entry to hone in on those perfect headshots a little more, so if you want to make sure you include any specific details, with just a few keystrokes, you can have the generator add those.
Time to wait
Once you’ve uploaded your photos and properly tweaked a few customization options, next comes the hardest part: waiting. Depending on the service—as well as the pricing package you’ve chosen—the wait time for image generation can take anywhere from thirty minutes to a few hours.
If you’re the impatient type, you can definitely pay to get faster results . No matter what, though, you’ll need to wait a little while for your batch of AI headshots.
Your images arrive
Keep your eyes peeled for an email notification that your images are ready—assuming you haven’t spent your time refreshing the AI app you’ve chosen to generate your images.
Depending on which of those pricing tiers you’ve chosen, that email will have a link to either a few dozen headshots or a hundred, if not more. From here, it’s time to sift through them for the best possible images.
How to Choose the Best AI Headshots for LinkedIn
While the vast number of AI-generated images can be, in a word, overwhelming, there are a few tips for keeping your focus on the trees over the forest. We’ll first dig into some AI oddities to keep an eye out for, then dive into what makes a great AI headshot for LinkedIn.
Common AI Mistakes
Today’s AI generators are great, but they’re not perfect, so out of all of the images that they can provide you, more than a few will have some telltale AI traits and mistakes to keep an eye out for, especially if you’re going for the most realistic images possible so that you don’t accidentally use a headshot on LinkedIn with obvious AI qualities.
Hands
Ah yes, this old chestnut. Despite their massive evolution over the past few years, AI image generators still have a hard time creating lifelike hands. A lot of the time, you can expect to find extra digits or unnatural patterns. While many generators have been trained to cleverly hide hands, be on the lookout for any hands that just don’t look natural.
Eyes
It’s true that we can tell a lot about a person by their eyes, including whether they’ve been AI-generated. While AI has gotten fairly good at these windows to the soul, sometimes, they can still create eyes that simply look wrong, which will understandably be pretty obvious to spot.
AI can also struggle with the light and reflection present in the eyes, which—though subtle—might also be something to keep an eye out for. These latter issues wouldn’t ruin an image, but they might still be noticeable.
Teeth
Much like eyes and hands, teeth can sometimes be tricky for AI to pull off, which is why you’ll notice that a lot of AI headshots feature closed-mouth smiles. That’s because teeth can look weird: misaligned teeth, teeth in the wrong spot, too many teeth.
Our mouths are surprisingly complex when you think about it, and sometimes, AI struggles with this complexity. So, if your headshots feature open-mouth smiles, take a good look at the teeth.
Clothes
While AI has gotten really good at producing clothes, the technology still isn’t perfect. Often, you can find odd creases or layers that don’t really make much logical sense, but at a glance, clothes produced by AI will be just fine. Just keep an eye out for any egregious and obvious mistakes.
Lighting
Natural lighting can be difficult for AI models to pull off, so keep an eye out for any pictures that may appear to be underlit, overlit, or have various degrees of overexposure. Although these quirks can lead to some nice, stylized photos, it’s not always the best option for professional headshots for LinkedIn.
Letters and Words
Granted, your AI LinkedIn headshots might not have too many letters, if any at all, but if your image has any labels or badges, take a close look at the lettering on them to make sure they aren’t making gibberish.
While that hits most of the major potential quirks to watch out for, you never know what other issues AI-generated images might have. So as you sift through your dozens or more headshots, look for anything that might detract from the image’s realism.
What Makes the Best AI Headshots for LinkedIn
Now that we’ve gotten rid of any of the generated headshots that have various types of AI mistakes, you should have quite a few potential great headshots to work with. Depending on your career, the best possible headshot might vary depending on a few different factors. So, let’s quickly break those down:
Background
This one should be easy, but it’s also exceedingly important to pick the right background. If you’re a lawyer, it’ll be good to have indoor backgrounds, maybe in a boardroom or, if possible, a courtroom. Real estate agents will want to be in the home and teachers in a classroom.
If you’re trying to create a more generalized headshot, then some outdoors locations might suit you very well. A larger depth of field (to create a blurred background) can also put more focus on your face, which is really important if you’re a model.
Expression
While this might simply come down to personal preference, it’s a great idea to consider what expression you’re making in the photo. Sometimes, in a professional setting, having a big, wide grin isn’t recommended, or the opposite—since having no smile whatsoever can make you seem a little off-putting.
You also don’t necessarily want to misrepresent yourself. If you never smile, then using that huge grin might not be the best idea. However, that’s also ultimately up to you.
Clothes
Aside from the obvious choices, such as uniforms for a specific profession (doctor, chef, nurse, etc.), you’ll want to consider the level of professionalism shown in your headshot. A blazer might be great if you work within the tech industry, but if you’re a CEO, you might want to opt for a full suit and tie.
If you’re self-employed, you are your own boss, so you have a lot more freedom with how you want to present yourself; if you want an air of casualness, you could simply pick a dress shirt for your headshot.
Pose
Much like clothing, the pose in your AI headshot can say a lot about your personality and level of professionalism. You can be standing or sitting, or you can do an extreme close-up of your face and eschew your body altogether.
Putting It All Together
By this point, you’ve generated your images and created what is likely a shortlist of the best possible AI headshots for you to use for LinkedIn. You’re basically done, but here are a few minor notes as we wrap up.
A few of the AI image apps out there allow you to further tweak images once you’ve created them. So, if there’s one image you like out of the batch, but you want to tweak any of its aspects, there’s a good chance that you can do just that with many of the options out there.
Once you’ve gone through the likely painstaking effort of picking your favorite headshot from four or five other great ones, it’s time to upload it. While many services offer images at high resolutions like 4K for LinkedIn specifically, you don’t need to worry much about resolution.
If you’re planning to use your headshots for anything outside of LinkedIn, it can help to have some larger images. However, considering how small most of the profile pics are, you can get by with 1080p just fine.
And that’s how you use AI to help put your best foot forward on LinkedIn.
Create Your AI Headshot with Portrait Pal
If you’re looking for a high-quality and easy-to-use headshot generator, then Portrait Pal has you covered. Not only will the images produced bear your likeness to an impressive degree, but the site also ensures that all the data you provide is safe and secure.
Portrait Pal’s basic tier will provide you with 20 high-quality headshots, with five separate backgrounds, poses, and outfits. It goes up from there with the higher priced packages offering up to 100 images, with 40 different backgrounds, poses, and outfits.
And to simply test out what Portrait Pal can do, you can create your first headshot for free.