How to anonymize resumes for blind hiring

The short answer

Cover everything that identifies the candidate or hints at their age, gender or background, and keep everything that shows what they can do. Then give each resume a neutral ID so reviewers score skills, not names.

The usual list to hide:

• Identity: name (in the header and anywhere else it appears), photo, signature.
• Contact details: email, phone number, home address, LinkedIn and personal website URLs.
• Age clues: date of birth, and often graduation years.
• Personal details: gender, marital status, nationality, religion, which some resumes still list.

Whether to also hide university and employer names depends on what your process is trying to reduce. Some teams hide them, others keep them because the experience matters. Decide once and apply it to every resume.

How to anonymize a batch of resumes

1. Collect the resumes as PDFs. If you have Word files, save them as PDF first (see how to redact a Word document).
2. Open Anonymize resume and drop in up to 20 files at once. Emails, phone numbers, URLs and dates of birth are found automatically.
3. Turn on the optional on-device AI to find names, places and organisations, then untick the ones you want reviewers to see, such as employers.
4. Use find and redact to cover the candidate's name everywhere: type it once and every match on every page is covered, including headers and footers.
5. Draw boxes over photos and anything the detectors missed.
6. Export as one combined PDF or a ZIP of PNGs, and rename each file with its candidate ID.

Keep the list that maps candidate IDs to real names somewhere reviewers can't see it, so you can contact the shortlist later.

Clues that are easy to miss

• File names like priya-sharma-cv.pdf. Rename before sharing.
• Email handles inside the text, such as a GitHub or portfolio link that contains the person's name.
• References at the end, which often include names and phone numbers of other people too.
• Hobbies and clubs that reveal religion, age or background.
• Document metadata, which can hold the author's name. Exporting from Blur Document removes it.

One trade-off to know

Exported pages are rebuilt from pixels, so the text in the anonymized PDF can't be selected or searched. That is what makes the redaction permanent, but it also means an applicant tracking system can't parse the anonymized copy. Keep the originals in your system of record and use the anonymized copies only for review.

For a quick anonymized summary pasted from a resume, the plain-text masker works on text directly.