Anonymised CVs: what to remove, and why it works

What a blind CV should hide, what it has to keep, and how to run an anonymised shortlist without losing the detail a hiring manager needs to make a decision.

Last updated 22 September 2026 · 7 minute read

An anonymised CV — also called a blind CV or a name-blind CV — is a candidate’s CV with the details that invite bias taken out, so that the first judgement a hiring manager makes is about the work. It is a well-established practice in the civil service and in large graduate schemes, and it is increasingly asked for by agency clients who want a defensible first sift.

It is also easy to do badly. Strip too little and the exercise is cosmetic; strip too much and you hand the client a document they cannot assess. Here is where the line usually sits.

Why clients ask for it

The research that made the case is now decades old and has been repeated in several countries. The best known is the Bertrand and Mullainathan field experiment in the United States, which sent matched CVs to real job adverts and found that identical applications with names perceived as white received markedly more callbacks than those with names perceived as Black. British studies by the Department for Work and Pensions and, later, by researchers at Nuffield College, Oxford, found the same pattern in the UK labour market. The point is not that hiring managers are acting in bad faith. It is that a name, a school, or a graduation year changes how the rest of the page is read, before anyone has decided anything.

Removing those signals at the first sift does two things for your client. It widens the field of candidates who get a proper reading, and it produces a record of a process that treated applicants consistently — useful if a decision is ever questioned.

What to remove

• Name. Replace it with initials or a reference, such as “Candidate A” or “JM”. A consistent reference matters, because you will need to match the shortlist back to real people.
• Photograph. Always, and not only on anonymised CVs.
• Contact details. Email address, phone number, postal address and profile links. An email address is often a name in disguise.
• Date of birth, age and nationality. Also marital status and anything about dependants, which should not be on a CV at all.
• Dates that reveal age indirectly. School leaving dates and graduation years are the common ones. Keep degree subjects and grades, drop the years.
• Named employers, where the name is a status signal rather than useful context. Replace with a description: “a global investment bank”, “a mid-size independent agency”, “a FTSE 250 retailer”.
• Named institutions. “A Russell Group university”, “a London university”, “a further education college”. This is the change clients push back on most, and the one that removes most of the bias.
• Anything that identifies a protected characteristic. Membership of religious or political organisations, gendered pronouns, and voluntary roles that reveal them. Use “they” throughout, or write around pronouns entirely.

What to keep

Everything that constitutes evidence of the work:

• Job titles and how long each role lasted, in years and months rather than dates
• The size, sector and scale of each employer, described rather than named
• Responsibilities, achievements and the numbers behind them
• Tools, systems, languages, methods and certifications
• Degree subject, level and grade, and any professional qualification
• Location at the level the role needs — a city or region, so that commute and right-to-work questions can still be asked
• Availability and notice period

Keeping durations rather than dates is the trick that makes anonymisation workable. “Four years and two months” tells a hiring manager exactly what they need about commitment and progression, without revealing when someone started their career.

Where it goes wrong

• Half-anonymised documents. The name is gone from the header but still in the file name, the document properties, the footer of page two or the covering email. Check all four.
• Losing the context with the name. Deleting “Goldman Sachs” and leaving a blank helps nobody. Replace it with a description of comparable weight.
• Gendered writing. A CV that says “she led” three times is not anonymised. This is the most common leak in rewritten summaries.
• Anonymising too late. If the client has already seen the full CV, there is nothing to undo. Anonymise at first submission or not at all.
• Anonymising the wrong stage. Blind CVs are a sifting tool. Once a candidate reaches interview, the client needs their name, and pretending otherwise creates awkwardness rather than fairness.
• Forgetting the audit trail. Keep your own mapping of references to candidates, held securely, so you can answer questions about the shortlist later.

How it fits into your process

In practice, an anonymised submission usually looks like this. You take the candidate’s CV, produce an anonymised version and a short anonymised profile, and send both with a reference rather than a name. The client sifts and tells you which references they want to meet. You then confirm the candidates, share full details for the ones going forward, and arrange the interviews as normal.

Two things are worth agreeing with the client in advance: how many stages stay blind, and who does the de-anonymising. Clients who have run this before often want the first sift blind and everything after it open. Clients new to it sometimes ask for blind interviews too, which is rarely practical and tends to be dropped after the first round.

Tell the candidate as well. Most are pleased, but a candidate who has been headhunted may want their employer’s name visible because it is their strongest card, and that is a conversation worth having before you submit rather than after.

Does it actually change outcomes?

It changes who gets read, which is the stage it is designed for. Evidence on whether it changes final hiring decisions is more mixed, precisely because later stages are not blind, and some studies have found that bias reappears at interview. That is not an argument against anonymising — a candidate who is never read cannot be hired — but it does mean anonymised CVs are one control among several, alongside structured interviews, scored criteria agreed before the shortlist, and more than one person in the room.

Frequently asked questions

Is anonymising CVs a legal requirement in the UK?

No. There is no general obligation to anonymise CVs. The Equality Act 2010 prohibits discrimination in recruitment, and anonymising is one way of reducing the risk of it, but the method is a matter of policy rather than law. Some public sector employers and frameworks require it under their own rules.

Should I remove employer names as well as the candidate’s name?

Replace them with descriptions rather than removing them. The status attached to a brand name is a real source of bias, and the useful information — the size and sector of the business — can be kept without it.

What about LinkedIn profiles?

Leave them out entirely. A profile link undoes the whole exercise in one click, and so does a personal website or a portfolio with the candidate’s name on it. If a portfolio is essential to the assessment, ask the candidate for an anonymised version.

How do I anonymise a CV quickly?

Working from a template rather than editing the original is faster and much less error-prone, because deleting details by hand is exactly how names get left in headers and file properties. Brandidate.ai produces an anonymised branded CV and a matching candidate profile from the original document, referring to the candidate by initials, replacing employers and institutions with descriptions and removing contact details, dates of birth and profile links.