Photography Tips · Brussels

LinkedIn Headshot For One New Employee: How Fast Can It Be Booked?

By Dmytro Derkach · Brussels-based commercial photographer

Yes — a single-person session is short, easy to schedule around one calendar, and invoiced to the company rather than the employee. It exists specifically for the week a team-wide shoot cannot cover.

The gap between team shoots and one urgent photo

Most companies handle headshots the sensible way: a corporate photography day once or twice a year, everyone photographed in one pass. That works until it doesn't. Someone joins in March. Someone gets promoted into a client-facing role in June. A journalist asks for a portrait by Friday. In every one of these cases, waiting for the next company-wide session means that person represents you for months with a holiday snapshot, a phone selfie, or nothing at all — during the exact stretch when they are most visible.

This is the session built for that gap: one person, one short slot, no minimum headcount, nobody to gather. It is booked for a single name and invoiced to the company, which is the practical difference from an employee arranging a photo privately and expensing it later.

Why this is a different product from a general LinkedIn headshot

A LinkedIn headshot bought by an individual and a LinkedIn headshot commissioned by an employer solve different problems. The individual is optimising for how they look. The employer is optimising for how the team looks together, on the same page, in the same tone. That second requirement is the one that actually matters here: the new portrait has to sit next to the ones already on your website without announcing that it was taken on a different day, in a different room, by a different photographer.

Matching is the technical part that matters

If your team was photographed before, the setup from that session gets reproduced — same light, same distance, same background, same retouching profile — so the new portrait doesn't stand out on the team page as the one taken two years later. Send one existing portrait as reference and the new one is matched to it. If there was no earlier session, this one simply becomes the reference for everything that follows, including the next full Headshot Day.

Turnaround when someone starts Monday

A single slot is short and easy to place in a diary, so the limiting factor is usually the new hire's calendar, not the photographer's. A first selection typically comes back within a day or two for approval, which matters when a LinkedIn profile or an internal directory listing needs to go live the same week the person starts.

Who actually picks the final photo

The person photographed chooses their own frame, on the spot, on the screen, before the session ends. It takes a minute and it prevents the common outcome where HR distributes a portrait and the employee quietly never uses it because they never approved it in the first place.

Should you just wait for the next team session instead?

If a company-wide shoot is genuinely weeks away, yes — wait, and save the trip. If it's a vague plan for "sometime next year," the honest answer is no. The cost of waiting is paid by whoever currently has no usable photograph representing them, and that cost stays invisible right up until someone actually looks at the team page.

A realistic market quote for a single-person corporate headshot session, matched to an existing team style and delivered in LinkedIn, CV and directory crops, typically falls between 200€ and 450€, depending on turnaround and the number of final files needed.