How to Run a Headshot Day for 50–200 Employees

A company headshot day is a logistics problem with a photographer attached. The photography is the easy part. Getting a hundred people through a conference room in a day, on time, looking like themselves, without disrupting the office, is the actual job, and most of it falls on whoever’s organizing it, usually HR, marketing, or the office manager.

Here’s how to plan on-site corporate headshots so the day works, based on doing this for companies in Boston, Cambridge, and New York City.

On-site, not studio

For anything over ten people, photograph at the office. Sending employees to a studio across town loses half a day per person and guarantees a third of them never go. An on-site headshot session takes each employee ten minutes, door to door, and the photographer brings everything: background, lighting, a monitor so people can see their images.

The exception is a small leadership team that wants a more produced look. Even then, the office usually has a better space than you’d think.

The space

You need a room roughly 12 by 15 feet, with a door that closes and a wall that’s not glass. A conference room is ideal. Natural light through a window is a bonus but not required; a good corporate headshot photographer brings lighting and can produce the same look in a windowless room at 4pm as in a bright one at 9am, which matters for consistency.

Book the room for the whole day and put a sign on it. The day fails when the 11:00 meeting shows up.

Scheduling

Slots of ten minutes per person, with a five-minute buffer every hour. For 100 people, that’s roughly two full days, or one long day with two photographers. Let people book their own slot through a shared calendar or a scheduling link. Don’t assign times; people won’t show up.

Schedule executives and anyone who travels first, before something comes up. Schedule the people who’ll dread it in the morning, before they’ve had time to think about it.

What to tell employees

Send one email, a week before, with four things:

Don’t send a style guide. Don’t send tips on smiling. The more instructions people get, the more nervous they arrive.

What happens in the room

Each person comes in, sits or stands, and is photographed for five or six minutes. They review their images on a monitor, pick a favorite, and leave. The photographer notes their name against the frame number. Some people want direction; most want it over with. A good headshot photographer reads which and adjusts. The people who hate having their picture taken often produce the best headshots, because they aren’t performing.

What goes wrong

No one owns the day. Someone has to be the point person, in the building, who can find the missing VP and clear the room when a meeting tries to take it.

Half the company is remote. Decide in advance whether remote employees come in for the day, get photographed at a separate session, or send in headshots made to a spec. The third option never matches. Budget for a second short session instead.

No plan for new hires. Ask the photographer to document the setup and book the next session before this one’s delivered. See the essay on why company headshots stop matching.

Delivery

Ask for a gallery sorted by employee name, with each person’s selected image retouched, delivered in a web-ready size and a high-resolution version. Ask for the whole company’s selects in one folder for the web team. Turnaround should be a week or less; anything longer and the momentum’s gone.

Evan Scales photographs on-site corporate headshots and team portraits for companies in Boston and New York City, and works with schools, universities, and healthcare organizations throughout the Northeast.