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What Is an Anonymized Resume for Blind Recruitment?

author

Trinh Nguyen

Sep 20, 2022

Bias has been raised as a major issue in recruiting, efficiently influencing your employee selection decisions. You may lose potential candidates due to unconscious prejudices. That’s where anonymized resumes or blind recruitment come in handy.

As the name suggests, an anonymized resume is a resume that is screened ‘blindly’ by the recruiter. It’ll remove all candidate identifiers such as name, age, gender, ethnic background, and address so that HR can focus solely on relevant skills and experience

In this article, we’ll show you 2 ways to anonymize resumes, manually and using the DrParser software. But before digging into the detail, we can discuss some benefits of anonymized resumes.

Let’s get the ball rolling!

Why Should You Anonymize CVs?

Honestly, cognitive biases are not completely HR’s fault or what they really want. It’s just the way the human brain processes information and comes to a decision. Despite being well-intentioned, each of us is still biased in many cases.

HR officers, and talent acquisition specialists, in particular, must take unconscious biases into account due to their damage to both the applicants and the company. These prejudices can stop you from hiring women, people of color, or other minorities.

Things to Hide from Resumes When Blindly Recruiting

Following are critical details that should be hidden from an anonymized resume.

  • Gender – Except for some specific jobs that are just for males or females, it’s not necessary to consider gender when rejecting or selecting a candidate.
  • Age – Both mature and younger candidates have their difficulties when applying for a job. The former finds it hard to get on well with the new environment while the latter is often seen as lacking maturity or experience. Employers must rely on the candidates’ skills and experience to hire them rather than age.
  • Physical Appearance – Particular jobs like modeling or PT require physical appearances. Other than that, employers shouldn’t consider appearance as an important factor when recruiting.

Benefits of Anonymized Resumes

Several reasons motivate you to use an anonymized resume for blindly recruiting. Not only do they create fair job chances for all candidates but also help protect your business and improve the diversity in the company.

  • Make the right hiring decision

Anonymized resumes, without a doubt, enable HR managers to pick the right candidate without being passively affected by discrimination. This will definitely result in a lower staff turnover rate and gives employees better chances to improve their performance.

  • Protect your business

There exists a fact that you may lose employees if you leave their contacts public, especially in the IT industry. Once clients have their information, they will hire these employees directly. You should conceal candidates’ identities until signing commitments with your clients.

  • Secure candidate’s information

Some candidates look for new job opportunities while still working at their current company. To prevent the employer from knowing if they’re seeking a job, they would want your company not to show up their private details.

  • Improve company diversity

Blind recruitment greatly contributes to positive company culture. As you don’t just concentrate on a specific type of employee, it gives candidates a more equal chance to compete for the position. This will result in a greater amount of diversity in your company.

The structure of a Blind Curriculum

So what exactly should be shown in the anonymized resume?

  • Contact details – A phone number would be a must in every CV/resume, enabling recruiters to contact candidates for phone screening or interviewing. Still, information like location, email address, or link to Facebook profile should stay covered.
  • Academic data – It’s necessary to have the applicant’s studies, degrees, courses obtained, and grades available. The education will partly show the candidate’s knowledge as well as their background
  • Previous work experience – This is the most important field of every resume, including past tasks, duties, and responsibilities. HR will rely on this the decide if a candidate is a good fit for the position/company.

How to Anonymize Resumes/CVs

There are 2 ways you can apply to make use of anonymized resumes for blind recruitment, either using the old manual method or seeking help from the DrParser tool.

#1 Manually Anonymize a CV

The blind hiring method takes recruiters a lot of time and effort. The HR won’t directly anonymize these resumes. Instead, they will ask an admin to collect all CVs from different sources and create a copy of these resumes with the personal data that may cause bias taken out.

Since the candidate names of these resumes are removed, the admin has to number every anonymized CV. They’ll match this number with the name of the corresponding candidate in a recording sheet.

Once you go through all the anonymized resumes and come up with a decision, you can let the admin know the numbers of the chosen CVs so they can contact and invite them for interviews. Of course, this process is time-consuming and may mix up applicants.

#2 Use DrParser for Automatic Anonymized Resumes

Rather than wasting your precious time preparing and anonymizing CVs, why don’t you take advantage of DrParser, a powerful resume parser software to extract resume information?

To explain how it works, the tool uses AI and deep learning modules to read and identify every field of a resume. Then, it’ll convert this information into a structured format. Fortunately, you can choose which fields/parameters would be hidden. For example, the candidate’s name, location, date of birth, previous employers, profile image, social profile links, etc.

To get started with the tool, all you need to do is open the DrParser product page, scroll down, and hit the Start button. After that, upload your desired resume and receive your converted resume data at the bottom of the page.

Out of the box, DrParser integrates seamlessly with ATS software, allowing headhunt agencies or job boards to screen and parse a huge amount of CVs quickly.

Blind Recruitment Stops Candidate Discrimination

CV discrimination has been ingrained in the subconscious of recruiters without their notice. Not only does it reduce the diversity in the workplace but also prevents your business from hiring the best candidates.

Blind recruitment by anonymized resumes proves a useful method to transform the recruitment process without being influenced by other factors.

While HR can manually blind recruiting, it’s highly recommended to utilize the DrParser software. The tool does wonder for generating anonymized copies of CVs and obscuring personal information.

What are you waiting for? Create anonymized resumes with DrParser today!

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