Glamour Shot in Professional Email

[Ghel]

The Closing Agent for the title company we use most often recently added a Glamour Shot style photo to her email signature. Her appearance has nothing to do with her job. She's a lovely woman, but that has no bearing on her work. It's weird. It borders on inappropriate. I just don't get it.

Has anyone else run into this?

[notalwaysright]

Is... Is a Closing Agent related to a real estate agent? Because at the roofing company, it was extremely common for real estate agents to have photos of themselves as part of their email signature. I don't know why they seem to think it matters what the person who sells a house looks like. I mean, you see their photos everywhere as part of their marketing. I personally find it off-putting. I feel like they are going to pressure me, like a used car salesman.

On a related note, I saw internal emails at the fabric store, and some people attached long quotes to their signatures. I mean, sometimes more than one quote, each in a different font and/or color. I thought that was beyond stupid. It make the whole message look messy, and what purpose does it serve, especially when the body of the email is just one line asking if our store has extra of some item, and can we sent some to them.

[Ghel]

Title companies are separate from real estate agents (at least here in Minnesota). The Closing Agent is the one who coordinates things between the seller, the buyer, the real estate agents, and the bank (if any). They also work with other employees at the title company who verify that there's no liens against the property and make sure the ownership is changed over correctly (which is the primary reason people hire title companies). Although they're the employee that customers see most, there's nothing in the Closing Agent's job that requires them to look good (professional, yes, but not attractive).

[paperfiend]

The Closing Agent for the title company we use most often recently added a Glamour Shot style photo to her email signature. Her appearance has nothing to do with her job. She's a lovely woman, but that has no bearing on her work. It's weird. It borders on inappropriate. I just don't get it.

Has anyone else run into this?

If by "Glamour Shot style" you mean a professionally taken headshot, then yes, I've seen this more and more. I think part of it is driven by the rise of Gmail and other cloud email services for companies and institutions. When my company switched to Gmail (but still addresses @mycompany.com), people started adding profile photos that show up next to their contact info. It's not a far stretch from there to add it to a signature. I actually find it helpful when I'm emailing someone I don't work with very often but have seen around the building, to put a name to a face.

If by "Glamour Shot" you mean too much makeup and "going out for the night" hairstyle, then yes I agree it's bordering on inappropriate.

[MoonCat]

People put a lot of odd things on professional emails. One of the nastiest, most miserable people I've ever had to deal with at work was a woman who worked at an ad agency (for some reason that industry seems to attract a lot of unpleasant and/or unintelligent people, or maybe I've just dealt with a disproportionate number of them) - at the end of her emails, under her name, it read "Tyson and Dakota's Mom" (not really those particular names but you get the idea).

To me this is completely irrelevant, pointless, and stupid. Who cares?? You're representing various clients in getting their ads placed in newspapers - no one needs or wants to know that you're somebody's mom. Plus she was just nasty.

[Shyla]

I've heard about more companies requiring a picture for emails. Depends on the job and the company. I think it's a fad. I'm with paperfiend. A professional head shot? No biggie. An overly made up, sexy shot? Nope. Not okay.

[Lachrymose]

Not exactly the same, but the company I work for has ID badges. But because we have many offices scattered across the area, and only one or two people that deal with making badges, they let employees send in their own pictures for the badge.

Now, that's kind of a bad idea to begin with because you get duckfaces and Facebook angles on official IDs (which I'm pretty sure they allow), but one person actually thought it would be a good idea to send a picture in using an Snapchat filter with the dog ears and tongue on her face.

I can't even.

[Ghel]

If by "Glamour Shot" you mean too much makeup and "going out for the night" hairstyle, then yes I agree it's bordering on inappropriate.

I don't know if I'm a good judge of "too much" makeup, but yeah, in the picture her hair's perfectly coiffed, her head's tilted to the side, slight smile, and soft focus. It feels like it's trying to shift the focus from the fact that she's actually good at her job to something related to her appearance.

I find it distracting, but maybe I'm making too much of it. I haven't (and wouldn't) say anything to her about it.

If this becomes a trend, I'm going to try to resist it as long as possible.

[EricKei]

Real Estate agents around here do it all the time (a relative is one), and they are encouraged by their companies to get their info, and especially faces, out there as much as possible. Never seen any of them use a fancy/professional shot in their sigs, just a well-crafted personal headshot; no bigger than the avatars on here. They also typically are encouraged to include social media icons, their personal listing website, and are required to include verbiage regarding their current professional status (e.g. Real Estate Agent / Broker / Partner (in the local office), etc).

[Heksubah]

Real Estate agents around here do it all the time (a relative is one), and they are encouraged by their companies to get their info, and especially faces, out there as much as possible.

The difference here would be if you look at a real estate agent like a salon hairstylist and the title insurance agent like the person who mixes the dyes in a factory. The real estate agent sells a house, the title agent is the one behind the scenes making sure the house is on land with clear title. They check for things like easements (because you wouldn't want to buy a house and find out your neighbors have a right to all the land for use as a driveway that you have to maintain!) and encroachments (neighbor has built a fence onto your land and is trying to take your land by using it as their own for long enough, or buildings that were put down wrong and are half on your land), or from things like bad taxes that were never paid by previous owners which means you would buy a house and the state then goes "HAHAHA, NOPE! OURS!"

Title agents aren't so much out in the forefront like a real estate agent. They don't sell things, they find problems and fix them so that a real estate agent has a clean sale and a happy customer. (Can you tell I used to work in title insurance? Though my business was a weird niche, all foreclosure, deed-in-lieu and REO.)

[wordgirl]

Title agents aren't so much out in the forefront like a real estate agent. They don't sell things, they find problems and fix them so that a real estate agent has a clean sale and a happy customer. (Can you tell I used to work in title insurance? Though my business was a weird niche, all foreclosure, deed-in-lieu and REO.)

THese kinds of things tend to run by industry, though, and in a smaller agency someone might spend part of their time doing nuts-and-bolts work and another part of the time doing direct sales. The real estate industry in particular places a significant emphasis on the notion of "personal branding" and "relationship marketing" and an email head shot is considered almost mandatory among real-estate professionals around here.

We are required in my workplace to have a picture connected to our work email. Curiously, they haven't yet said "everyone must have headshots," so I use a recognizable local landmark as my picture (and my identity is not a significant part of my work product unlike some of my co-workers). But there's a good bit of research out there showing that when people can associate a work product with a physical human being, they have a more positive reaction overall. Same phenomenon that goes with those "inspected by Suzy" tags you find in clothes.

So to answer Ghel's question ... no it doesn't seem weird to me at all. It might not be as prevalent in her area, but I'd bet it will be soon. If my work place starts requiring everyone to have headshots, I will make sure I get a professional one that looks as good as possible.

[Minflick]

Another fun easement: Buy a house on a state highway. Not a huge highway, but a vital transit corridor. See the easement on the plat map, hmmm, looks like it's just the driveway for us, NBD. Live there several years. Hear an accident down the road, somebody screaming. Screams until the ambulance arrives to take him to the hospital.

He sues the state because the fences of 2 houses blocked his view of approaching traffic and a car hit him and his motorcycle. My house is the 3rd of 4 houses between his little side street and a county park, so the state comes out, flags everybody's property, and issues "take down your fence by [date] or we'll do it and bill you. Call us with any questions"

I dig out the plat map, I look at their fluorescent stakes and I start cussing. Yes, their easement is only my driveway, BUT, now my fence really does have to come down, and if I want to replace it, it's going to have to be on the house side of the driveway, which would mean moving rose bushes and blocking all sun to a flower bed in front of the house. Because this would be a privacy fence, and a sound barrier (at least a little), so it would need to be tall enough to do it's job, hence the sun blocking to the flower bed.

The fence came down, the road noise increased notably in the front of the house, and there was no more privacy out front at all. My fence didn't actually block the view from the side street, but because of the law suit, and the fact that there were only 4 houses on this stretch, they just made us take our fences down to keep things cleaner and less argumentative. Sigh.

[MoonCat]

BTW, for those who may not know, Glamour Shots was (is?) a company that specialized in that sort of full makeup-perfect coif-soft-focus-head tilted kind of portrait. It was quite trendy at one point to get your photo taken like that.

In my opinion it's not really appropriate for a business card, business ID, or your email, unless you're in, say, the fashion or make-up industry. Our IDs where I work have more of the driver's license crappy photo kind of look.

[Argabarga]

For some reason it stuck with me, but, I still remember my senior year of High School when they gave us our first lesson on how to construct a resume, and I specifically remember the major "DO NOT DO THIS" bullet points included:

- no personal pictures

- no "cutesy" clip art flourishes

- no listing of personal interests unless job calls for them.


I guess they don't teach that class anymore.

[mhkohne]

BTW, for those who may not know, Glamour Shots was (is?) a company that specialized in that sort of full makeup-perfect coif-soft-focus-head tilted kind of portrait. It was quite trendy at one point to get your photo taken like that.

In my opinion it's not really appropriate for a business card, business ID, or your email, unless you're in, say, the fashion or make-up industry. Our IDs where I work have more of the driver's license crappy photo kind of look.

It's not uncommon for sales types to have such shots on their cards, but that's in industries (like real estate) where the personal connection is still primary.