Photos matter.
A lot of the growth in the tech world over the past few years (companies like Facebook, Instagram) has been fueled by the sharing and exchange of images online. It’s the reason companies like Snapchat are now worth billions of dollars despite not making any money.
Silicon Valley is swimming with talent and and everyone’s friend, brother and grandmother is the founder of some obscure startup, using blockchain and machine learning to solve an immediate market need. In our increasingly digital era, your online presence and image is more important than ever.
In case you haven’t read our previous article, at Snappr we’ve developed a LinkedIn Photo Analyser that uses artificial intelligence to evaluate portraits for things like expression (e.g. smile and jawline), composition (e.g. zoom and background), and photo quality (e.g. saturation and sharpness). These attributes are graded individually and incorporated into an overall photo quality score.
To follow up on our previous analysis, we’ve decided to look at the faces of the tech giants of our world. Let’s investigate if the employees of the best performing tech companies also have the best photos.
The verdict is out and according to our Photo Analyser, employees at Apple have the best LinkedIn photos in the tech industry. This could mean that you’re more likely to get a job at Apple if you have a great LinkedIn photo. So if you’re looking to design the next iPhone, maybe you should make it your priority to book a Snappr and get some quality headshots. And if you’re wondering why you’re stuck in a dead-end career at IBM, it might be because your LinkedIn photo is below the industry average.
If we look at smile ratings however, Facebook leads the charge with the highest average rating while Microsoft sits far below the group average in last place. I guess the Surface Studio was not as big of a hit as the Softies expected.
If you’ve spent the past 4 years studying computer science at Stanford and are now juggling offers from these companies, perhaps you should use this as a gauge for how happy their employees are.
In tech, there is the age old rivalry between the engineering and sales team. Looking at the Bay Area, our analyser tells us that salespeople have a significantly higher smile rating compared to engineers, almost 40% higher. This comes as no surprise given that smiling as a salesperson is almost a job requirement.
What’s more interesting however is when we look at their overall scores, we find that engineers in the Bay Area have better photos on average! Whether Silicon Valley engineers are better looking than their sales counterparts, we don’t know. Looks like we’ll have to call this one a tie.
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Keep in mind, our Photo Analyzer is a technical tool, not the final word on photographic artistry. Your portrait may very well deserve a space at the Met, but if it doesn’t follow the rule of thirds, have a neutral background, or showcase your dazzling smile, it won’t receive a high score. Research has shown that these attributes inspire positive impressions in viewers, and our Analyzer is designed to measure them.
But limitations aside, what did we find? In the tech industry, we saw that employees at Apple and Facebook tend to have better photos than those at IBM and Microsoft. And in the Bay Area, engineers tend to have better photos than salespeople although salespeople have better smiles.
So how does your photo stack up against the rest? Use our Photo Analyzer to find out.
