How to Redact a CV Before You Send It On

Sending a candidate to a client — without sending the candidate

You have found someone good, and now the client needs to see them. The client should see the experience, the skills, the level. The client should not see the name, the photo, the contact details or where the person works right now.

In the trade this is a blind CV — an anonymised CV. There are three reasons for it, and all three are real:

• Bias. A name, an age, a photograph and the name of a university shift the assessment before the reader has got as far as the experience. That is the reason everyone states out loud, and it happens to be true.
• The client asks for it. Larger buyers — finance, consulting, technology, the public sector — increasingly require anonymised CVs as a matter of policy, and some of them audit it.
• Your fee. Give a client the name, the current employer and a way to make contact, and there is nothing standing between them. The placement you worked for can simply evaporate.

The third reason is the one that never appears in articles about diversity hiring, and it is the one that keeps the habit alive.

What comes out of a blind CV

The standard list of what comes out:

• name and photograph;
• contact details — email, phone, links to profiles;
• the current employer;
• home address and age;
• often the university and the years attended as well, since between them they give away both age and background.

What stays is the thing the CV was sent for: the experience, the responsibilities, the skills, the results.

Why this is more fiddly than it looks

A name does not appear in a CV once. It is at the top, in the header or footer of every page, inside the email address, in the file name, sometimes in a sign-off at the end. The current employer is in the job title, in the description of the duties, in the list of achievements, and again in the references.

So you are removing a dozen instances scattered across two pages, and you cannot afford to miss one — while leaving nearly everything else exactly where it is.

That is precisely the shape of task where manual work breaks down. Not because any single step is difficult, but because there are many of them and they are in a different place on every CV that lands in your inbox.

A black box on a PDF keeps the name inside the file

A CV is almost always a PDF or a Word document. Drawing a black rectangle over the name in either of them does not remove the name — the rectangle is a shape sitting on top, and the text underneath is still in the file. Select, copy, paste, and there it is.

Word adds two more leaks on top of that: tracked changes, and the document properties, where the author's name very often sits in plain sight under File → Info.

This is not a theoretical footnote. A client who receives that file learns the candidate's name in about ten seconds — and your placement is suddenly an open question.

There are two honest ways round it. If you have the source document and time, rebuild the CV in your own template, which is what larger agencies do anyway. If you need it done now, send an image instead of a document: an image has no text layer, so what you hid is genuinely not in the file.

The free way, and where it stops

Windows can do part of this for you. On Windows 11 (build 24H2 and later):

1. Open the CV on screen, then open the Snipping Tool from the Start menu.
2. Click New and drag across the page. The capture opens in the Snipping Tool, ready to work on.
3. Click Scan Text.
4. Quick Redact — it will black out the email address and the phone number by itself.
5. Everything else: select it by hand and choose Redact.

Quick Redact finds the email and the phone because both have a recognisable shape.

It will not find the name. It will not find the employer. It will not find the university. To the software these are ordinary words, indistinguishable from a section heading, and it has no way of knowing that they are the ones identifying your candidate. The most important part of a blind CV is exactly the part automation cannot see — and that is not a bug that will be fixed in a later version. There is nothing there to recognise.

Hide the page, reveal the experience

Turn it around: instead of hunting for a dozen mentions to cover, hide the page in one go and reveal the blocks that are supposed to go to the client — the roles, the dates, the achievements, the skills.

An honest note about this one, because a CV is not the same case as a bank statement: here you reveal most of the page and hide less of it, so this isn't fewer movements. It is fewer chances to miss something. You are working with four or five large blocks rather than tracking down a dozen small mentions, and the footer on page two — the one with the name in 8pt grey — was never revealed, because you never went near it.

One thing worth doing regardless of tool: after you finish, read the page back as if you were the client. The giveaway is rarely the name. It is a sentence like "led the Halberd migration" sitting in the middle of an achievement, which no automatic tool will ever flag and which you will spot in two seconds.

Can what you hid be recovered?

The straight answer: try it yourself. Blur something, then see what you can get back with the free tools online. Nothing ordinary will undo it.

What is hidden has been baked into the pixels. There is no layer to peel away and no original tucked inside the file — which is exactly the difference between this and the black box on the PDF above.

Anyone who would genuinely set out to reconstruct an image came for that specifically, and a candidate's CV is not the sort of thing that attracts that kind of attention.

Even so, if a CV is going out to a wide distribution list, BlurSnap has a frosted glass mode: hidden areas are replaced with a plain sheet rather than blurred, so nothing left in the file is derived from what was hidden.

A quick check before you send it on

• the header and footer — on every page, not just the first;
• the file name;
• the email address inside the text, not only in the contact block;
• the current employer where it appears inside a description, not as a heading;
• referees — their names and companies are somebody else's data too;
• links to profiles, which carry the name in the URL itself;
• the photo, if there is one.

Why I built this

What put me onto this was a version of the same thing that happens to you: a recipient saw something they were never meant to see.

Not a catastrophe — nobody's life was ruined. Just a screenshot sent in a hurry, with a detail at the edge of it that belonged to somebody else entirely. The other person noticed before I did, which is the part that stays with you. After that the question stopped being how to be more careful, and became how to make carelessness impossible.

More about why I built BlurSnap →

If something here doesn't match how it actually works day to day, tell me — that genuinely helps: support@blursnap.app