CV Redaction: What It Means and How to Do It Properly

CV redaction is the removal of selected personal details from a candidate's CV before it is shared, most often contact information such as email address, phone number, home address and personal web links.

Recruitment agencies redact CVs for two main reasons: to protect the candidate's privacy, sharing only what the client needs at this stage, and to protect the agency's introduction, so the client contacts the candidate through the agency rather than directly.

What is usually redacted

• Email addresses and phone numbers, including secondary numbers in footers.
• Home address, often reduced to a town or region if location matters.
• Personal links, such as LinkedIn, GitHub, portfolio or personal websites.
• Name, sometimes replaced by a candidate reference for an early-stage or confidential submission.
• Referee details, which clients rarely need at the CV stage.

Some processes go further and remove details that could lead to bias, such as date of birth, photographs or nationality. That moves from redaction towards CV anonymisation or a blind CV.

Where personal details hide

Redaction often fails not in the body of the CV but in places nobody looks:

• Headers and footers, which many CV templates use for contact details.
• Document properties, where Word stores author name, company and other metadata.
• Hyperlinks, where the visible text has been changed but the link target still contains a profile URL.
• Text boxes and tables, which are easy to skip when editing by hand.
• File names, such as "Jane-Smith-CV.pdf".
• PDF metadata, which may carry the original author or title.

A redaction routine should check all of these, not just the first page. Our guide to removing contact details from a CV walks through each.

Redaction is not anonymisation

Removing contact details stops a client contacting the candidate directly, but it does not make the candidate anonymous. A career history, with specific employers, dates, projects and achievements, can still identify a person, especially in small or senior markets. Be careful how you describe a redacted CV to candidates and clients.

Good redaction practice

1. Keep the original CV unchanged and separate from the redacted version.
2. Decide the redaction policy per client and apply it consistently.
3. Redact in the generated document and its metadata, not only the visible text.
4. Check the final PDF and Word file before sending.
5. Record what was removed, so you can explain it if asked.

How CVPitch handles redaction

In CVPitch you choose which contact details to remove: email, phone, address and links, or the name replaced with a candidate reference. You can also remove date of birth, nationality and similar personal-detail lines and mask employers and institutions. Removal is applied to the generated DOCX and PDF, including hidden document metadata, CVPitch checks the generated files for any removed contact detail or masked name before they are ready, and the original CV is stored separately and never overwritten. Client variants can set a privacy preset so the right policy applies automatically, and approval is tied to the policy in force. See features and security.

Related terms

• CV anonymisation: removing everything that could reasonably identify someone.
• Blind CV: removing bias-prone details for fairer shortlisting.
• Candidate submission: the package where redaction usually happens.

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