From Photo to First Visit: Using Headshots to Scale Career Services Reach

• Summary

  Career services work. Students who engage are 24% more likely to receive a job offer and 8% more likely to secure full-time employment. The challenge is reaching the majority who never walk in. The answer lives at the top of the funnel: the one thing students say yes to before they’re ready for anything else. For career services, that’s a professional headshot. It’s low-friction, immediate, universally relevant, and requires no readiness threshold.

  This session covers three strategies learned from hundreds of schools offering headshots as an always-on student engagement engine, so you can reach more students and scale your career center’s impact.

  Following this program, you will be able to:

  • Evaluate the tradeoffs between ad hoc, DIY, and always-on headshot programs—and how each approach shapes student participation rates, reach, and outcomes.
  • Build campus partnerships that expand your headshot program beyond career services and drive consistent traffic from student populations you are not currently reaching.
  • Use headshot engagement data to make the internal budget case and break the cycle where improving outcomes requires funding, but securing funding requires improved outcomes.

• Presenters

  

  Brandon Ghaeli, CEO, Iris Booth Inc.

  Brandon Ghaeli is the CEO of Iris Booth, which helps hundreds of institutions worldwide deliver professional headshots through self-serve photo booths. He draws on a career in marketing, growth, and scaling at global companies including Shopify to bring a practitioner’s perspective to student engagement in career centers.

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