Anonymising CVs for blind recruitment

Why anonymise applications

A name, a photo, an age or an address can influence a reader without them noticing. Blind review removes those signals at the first stage, so that the shortlist rests on what the job requires. The candidates' identities come back at the interview stage.

In France, a law of 2006 provided for anonymous CVs in companies of fifty employees or more; it was never applied and has been optional since 2015. Many organisations practise it anyway, for some or all of their positions, and some candidates ask for it.

What to mask

• Surname and first name, everywhere they appear: header, e-mail address, file name, signature of the cover letter.
• The photo: it is an image, so a zone has to be drawn over it.
• Postal address, e-mail address, phone number, links to social network profiles.
• Date of birth or age, nationality, family situation, number of children.
• Anything else your policy treats as a source of bias: a hobby that reveals a belief, the name of a reference.

What to keep

Experience with its dates and responsibilities, skills, qualifications, languages, achievements. The aim is to judge the application, not to empty it.

Some details are harder: the name of a school or of an employer can hint at an origin or an age, and French grammar reveals gender ("titulaire", "diplômée"). Decide in advance what your organisation masks, and apply the same rule to every application.

Organising the process

1. Choose who anonymises: someone who does not sit on the hiring panel.
2. Give each application a number, and keep the list matching numbers to names apart from the anonymised copies.
3. Mask each CV and cover letter with the same rule.
4. Check each copy before sending it to the panel: select the text under the masks, look at the file properties.
5. Name the copies by their number, never by the candidate's name.
6. Reveal identities only for the candidates invited to interview.

Anonymising CVs with Obscelis

Obscelis finds names, addresses, e-mail addresses and phone numbers in each application, and you draw a zone over the photo. The exported copy has its pages rebuilt as images, its metadata removed (author and title often hold the candidate's name) and is reread before it is published.

With the Pro and Team plans, a whole project of applications is analysed and exported at once, with your own rules (a list of words to mask, for example). Today Obscelis reads PDF and text files: convert a Word CV to PDF before importing it. Everything happens on your computer; the applications are never sent to a third-party service.

See the plans

Questions