The Question Nobody Answers Straight
You're staring at a blank corner of your CV, cursor blinking, and you don't know if a photo goes there. Every article you've read gives you the opposite answer to the last one. Recruiters in Athens tell you a CV without a photo looks unfinished. A hiring guide written for London tells you a photo will get your CV binned before anyone reads a line of it. Both are right — for different audiences. Nobody tells you which audience you're actually writing for, which is why you're still stuck.
Why the Generic Advice Doesn't Fit You
Most "never include a photo" advice you find online was written for the US or UK market, where photos are avoided almost entirely because of anti-discrimination law and standard recruiter training. That advice isn't wrong — it's just not written for Greece, or for the specific company you're applying to. Greece sits in an odd spot: still influenced by older, more personal hiring habits in plenty of domestic industries, while also being full of multinationals, tech companies, and EU-adjacent employers that follow the opposite convention completely. Treating "Greece" as one hiring culture is the mistake.
The Real Rule: It's About Who Reads It, Not Where You Live
Forget nationality for a second. What matters is the hiring culture of the specific employer and role in front of you. Three situations, three different right answers.
1. Traditional Greek companies, SMEs, and family-run businesses
In a large share of domestic Greek hiring — retail, hospitality, traditional manufacturing, and many smaller local companies — a photo is still expected, sometimes unconsciously. HR staff and owners raised on the old-style Greek CV format read a photo-less CV as incomplete, almost like a form missing a signature. If you're applying to this kind of employer, in Greek, for a role inside Greece, including a clean, professional photo is usually the safer choice. It won't make a weak CV strong, but in more conservative offices its absence can quietly make you look like you didn't bother to follow the expected format.
2. Multinationals, tech companies, and international teams operating in Greece
Flip that completely. Multinational HR departments — even the Greek offices of global companies — are usually trained on international hiring standards that actively discourage photos, precisely because they open the door to unconscious bias claims and, in some countries, legal risk. Many of these companies use applicant tracking systems configured by a global HQ that assumes a photo-free CV format. Submit a photo here and, at best, it's ignored. At worst, it clutters the formatting or triggers a "why did they include this, don't they know our process" reaction from a screener reviewing hundreds of standardized CVs a week.
3. Applying abroad, remote, or to EU institutions
If you're sending your CV to Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, the US, or applying for a role with an EU institution or agency, drop the photo. No exceptions worth making. EU institution recruitment guidance explicitly asks candidates not to include one, precisely to standardize screening. The UK and US treat a photo as, at minimum, an odd choice and at worst a legal liability for the employer, which means recruiters are trained to view it with suspicion rather than warmth.
The Practical Problem Nobody Mentions: ATS and Formatting
Beyond culture, there's a mechanical issue. A photo embedded in a CV — especially one placed in a header, text box, or table cell — can break how applicant tracking systems parse your document. Some systems fail to extract text sitting next to or behind an image. Others strip the image and leave an ugly blank gap or a broken layout that looks careless to the human who opens it afterward. If you're applying through an online portal to any company using ATS software, which is most mid-size and large employers now, a badly placed photo is a formatting risk regardless of what you decide about the cultural question.
If You Decide to Include One: Do It Right or Don't Bother
A bad photo is worse than no photo. If you're including one because you're applying within a traditional domestic context, hold it to a real standard:
- Recent. Taken within the last one to two years — not your university graduation photo.
- Plain background. No holiday photos cropped down, no busy backgrounds, no other people cut out of frame.
- Business-appropriate clothing. Match what you'd wear to the interview, not what you'd wear on a night out.
- Forward-facing, good lighting, neutral expression or a small natural smile. No filters, no heavy editing.
- Small and positioned in a corner — never a full-page portrait, never centered as the visual focus of the page. Your experience is the product; the photo is a footnote.
If you can't produce a photo that meets that bar, leave the space empty. An empty corner reads as neutral. A poor-quality, badly lit, oddly cropped photo reads as careless — and careless is the one impression your CV can never afford to give.
If You Skip It: What Actually Fills the Space
The header space you free up by dropping the photo is valuable real estate — use it for a one-line summary of who you are professionally, or simply let your name and title breathe with more white space, which reads as more confident and modern than a cramped photo box. Your LinkedIn photo, separately, should still be professional; recruiters who like your CV will look you up there regardless of what's on the document itself.
The GDPR Angle, Briefly
A photo is personal data under GDPR, same as your date of birth or nationality. Reputable employers in Greece and across the EU are increasingly cautious about collecting more personal data than they need at the CV stage, which is part of why the multinational and EU-institution norm has shifted away from photos over the last several years. It's not the deciding factor for most job seekers, but it's part of why the trend is moving one direction.
How to Decide in the Next 30 Seconds
Ask yourself three questions:
- Is the employer a traditional domestic Greek company, hiring for a role inside Greece, in Greek? → A clean, professional photo is fine, often expected.
- Is it a multinational, tech company, or any employer using an online ATS portal? → Skip the photo.
- Is the role abroad, remote for an international team, or with an EU institution? → Skip the photo, no exceptions.
When you genuinely can't tell which bucket an employer falls into, the safer default in 2026 is to leave it out and let the content of your CV do the convincing — a strong CV without a photo has never cost anyone an interview; a badly judged photo has.
Not Sure Which Version of You Should Be on Paper?
This is exactly the kind of small decision that's hard to get right alone, because it depends on details specific to your industry, your target employer, and how your CV is formatted overall — which is precisely what gets checked in our free CV review. A human reviewer looks at your actual document against real HR standards and tells you, among other things, whether a photo is helping or hurting your specific application. If you're rebuilding your CV for an international audience or a multinational employer, our Career Premium and Career Concierge packages include formatting built for exactly these ATS and cross-market situations. Start with the free review — it costs you nothing and tells you where you actually stand.