Job Hunting? Clean Up Your Face Search Results Before You Apply

What you get

• A clean first impression. Your photo stops leading to pages you did not choose to share.
• Control of the timing. You decide what a new employer learns about your past, and when.
• It keeps working. We re-file every month, so results that come back get removed again.

What a hiring manager can find from your photo

Your application usually carries your face. It sits on LinkedIn, on your portfolio, or in the video-call thumbnail. A face-search engine takes that one image and returns other public pages where the same face appears.

• Anyone can do it. PimEyes and FaceCheck.ID are open to the public and need only a payment card. No special access, no training.
• It skips your name. A common name, a changed name or a private profile makes no difference to a search that runs on your face.
• It finds other people’s uploads. A friend’s party album, an old event gallery, a forum avatar from years back.

Screening candidates online is already routine. In a 2018 CareerBuilder survey run by The Harris Poll, 70% of employers said they research candidates on social media, and 57% of those had found something that led them not to hire. Nobody has published a reliable figure for face search specifically, so we will not invent one. What we can show you is how little effort it takes: see how recruiters face-search candidates.

Jobs where this matters most

Every employer cares about reputation. Some roles are hired on it, because the public, a regulator or a client has to trust you personally.

• Teachers and school staff. Hiring panels answer to a whole community, and schools are cautious by design.
• Nurses, doctors and care workers. Licensing boards and employers both look at conduct outside work.
• Lawyers, paralegals and financial advisers. Regulated professions with a “fit and proper” test.
• Estate agents, sales and client-facing roles. Your face is on the sign, the website and the business card, so clients search it too.
• Police, security and anything with a clearance. Background checks are deep, and investigators are thorough.
• Executives and spokespeople. Journalists and competitors search as well as the board.

None of this requires that you did anything wrong. A photo without its context is enough to cost you a call-back.

A teacher’s example

Picture a teacher with eight good years behind him, applying to a school in a new town. His references are strong. Someone on the panel runs his staff photo through a face-search engine before the interview.

Three results come back:

• A friend’s public album from a stag weekend, nine years old.
• His photo on a bar’s old staff page, from the job that paid for his teaching degree.
• A dating profile he closed four years ago, still cached on a third-party site.

All three are ordinary. None appears on his CV, and he never chose to show any of them to an employer. He will also never learn they were seen. Panels rarely explain why a candidate did not move forward.

The same pattern fits a nurse with old festival photos, a financial adviser who once modelled for a friend’s clothing brand, or a paralegal photographed at a protest as a student.

How long removal takes

• To start: one afternoon. You upload a front photo and a side profile. Some engines also ask for an ID, which we redact before it is sent.
• To see results: days to a few weeks. Each engine works at its own speed. Lenso.ai is usually quick. PimEyes and FaceCheck.ID often take longer.
• To stay clean: ongoing. Engines re-crawl the web, so we re-file every month.

You can watch each request in your dashboard: which engine, the date it was filed, and any reply. We cannot guarantee how any engine responds. We also do not delete the original photos from the sites that host them. We ask the engines to stop returning your face.

Interview this week? Do these four things today

1. Search yourself first. Ten minutes, free: audit your own face exposure. Now you know what is there.
2. File the fastest opt-outs. Start with Lenso.ai, then PimEyes and FaceCheck.ID.
3. Lock down what you control. Old profiles, public albums, forgotten accounts. Ask the friend to set that album to private.
4. Prepare one sentence. If a result will still be live on the day, decide now how you would explain it. A calm answer beats a surprised one.

Common doubts

“I have nothing embarrassing online.”

You may be right. Most people are surprised by one result, usually a photo someone else posted. The free self-check above settles it in ten minutes.

“Recruiters do not really do this.”

Many do not. The tools cost a few dollars and take thirty seconds, so you only need one curious person on the panel. For a role hired on trust, assume someone looks.

“I can do it myself for free.”

Yes, and our guides show you how. The hard part is repeating it every month on every engine while you are also job hunting. That repetition is the part we take over.

“Is my photo safe with you?”

Your photos are stored encrypted and used for one purpose: filing your removals. We never use them to train any model. You can delete your account and every photo yourself, at any time, from the dashboard or the app.

“What does it cost?”

US$9.99 a month, or US$7.99 a month billed annually. Cancel from your dashboard whenever you like. Web payments made through Stripe carry a 30-day money-back guarantee.