What Are Anonymized Resumes and Blind CVs? How to Create Them

An anonymous resume/blind CV can help remove bias from the hiring process. Find out what they are and how to create one.

Bias is a bigger problem in hiring than many people realize. Unconscious prejudices from a culture or upbringing can subtly influence the decisions of even well-meaning, socially conscious people. Anonymized resumes and blind CVs can help.

What Is an Anonymized Resume?

Your resume carries a lot more information than just your job experience and education. It also likely features or at least implies your name, age, gender, ethnic background, address, and more. An anonymized resume removes all of these identifiers, focusing solely on your relevant skills and experience.

Blind recruitment examples date back to the 1970s, when the Toronto Symphony began using partitions to hide people who were auditioning. That way, those in charge of hiring could hear the music people played but not see them. As more groups followed suit, the ratio of female musicians in top orchestras increased from just 5 percent to 25 percent.

Blind recruitment today applies the same principle to conventional resumes and CVs. Businesses use software or a third party to remove personal identifiers from these documents before passing them to HR departments and managers.

Why Use Anonymized Resumes?

CV discrimination is surprisingly common, even today. Unconscious biases stop people from hiring women, people of color, or other minorities, and this is damaging both to the applicants and the company.

Businesses may turn away top candidates without realizing it, thanks to unconscious bias. Since these prejudices are often deep-rooted and hard to quantify, it’s best to remove the chance for them to show up at all. Removing identifiers helps focus on the experience and soft skills that 59 percent of hiring managers say they have difficulty finding, according to research by Guy Berger, Ph.D.

Blind recruitment examples from real companies prove that these anonymizing measures improve workforce diversity. When database solution provider Cockroach Labs adopted blind CVs, it saw a 50 percent increase in female employees, including 30 percent more in management positions.

By removing things like names, ages, and addresses, businesses can ensure their hiring practices are unbiased. Qualified applicants that may face prejudice elsewhere can then get the opportunities they deserve.

Increasing diversity has tangible business benefits, too. According to Glassdoor, companies with more diverse executive leadership are 21 percent more profitable, and 76 percent of job-seekers say diversity is important to them when looking for a place to work.

How to Enable Blind Recruitment

The most straightforward way to enable anonymized resumes is to have an employee do it. HR departments can pass resumes and CVs to someone uninvolved in the hiring process to copy these documents’ information into standard forms without things like names and addresses. This approach to blind recruitment is easy, but it’s also inefficient and introduces the potential for data entry errors.

A more reliable approach is to use blind CV software. Programs like Hire, Inda, Pinpoint, Textio, and Blendoor will automatically remove demographic information from resumes and CVs. Companies can choose what kind of information to keep and what to remove, and the software will do it all when applicants submit their documents.

Blind CV software can help remove concerns with other hiring AI programs, too. Hiring algorithms that use AI often show human bias because they learn from biased data. If other programs remove factors that these models may mark as negative first, they can avoid these harmful incidents.

How to Anonymize Your Resume/CV

You can also anonymize your resume or CV as a job applicant. Removing some identifiers could help you promote blind hiring and avoid discrimination. You can delete some information, like pronouns or other gender identifiers, from your resume entirely without it seeming out of place.

Similarly, you can simply delete dates like your birthday and date ranges for your education and experience to keep your age private. You can also delete your street address, but leave your city and state, so they can know if you’re within distance. You can also create a hybrid resume if you want.

For other information, you’ll have to reword it. You can change the names of schools you’ve attended for more general placeholders, like “state university” or “liberal arts college.” Similarly, you can replace the names of companies you’ve worked at with descriptors like “Fortune 500 tech firm.”

Keep in mind that you won’t be able to remove as much information as the recruiter themselves could use blind CV software. The company needs some way to identify and contact you, so you’ll have to leave your name and contact details. Blind CV software works around that by temporarily replacing names with placeholders or numbers, but you don’t have that advantage when anonymizing your own resume.

Blind Recruitment Stops CV Discrimination

CV discrimination is far more common than many people may realize because unconscious prejudices are so deep-rooted. Since they’re subconscious, they’re also difficult for humans to recognize and work around. Blind CV software can help overcome this hurdle and create more equitable hiring practices.

Anonymized resumes can help any business remove bias from its hiring process. While this is just the beginning of creating a fair workplace, it’s an excellent first step.