What Info is Permissible on a Redacted CV?

2023-01-07 3 min read Psychology Thedevopscat

I recently saw a job advertised where the application process required a redacted CV, but didn’t go as far to say what information was permissible. It did however state if your CV contains any personal details your application may be withdrawn. Assuming you were genuinely interested in the job, this is not something that you want to get wrong!

I think we can all agree that we all like to be treated fairly, and would like to think we were hired for a new job based on the merits of our skills and experience rather than gender, age, race, or ethnicity etc. so I wholly support a redacted CV screening process to remove reviewer bias.

In this day and age, we are all familiar with the requirements of GDPR and should have an understanding of what constitutes personally identifiable information (PII), which for me makes the redacted CV requirements all the more perplexing.

As a reminder a definition of PII for the requirements of GDPR is as follows:

Almost all of our interactions with organizations involve an exchange of personal data. Examples include name, phone number, and address.
One of these pieces of data may not be enough to identify an individual. However, when collected together, they can identify a particular person and therefore constitute personal data.
Data ceases to be personal when it is made anonymous, and an individual is no longer identifiable. But for data to be truly anonymised, the anonymisation > must be irreversible.

So getting back to the case in point, we obviously need to redact our name, phone number, address, e-mail address etc. but our working history and education could easily give away personal information especially where dates are applied (age, sex and location spring to mind).

As a starting point I’m going to suggest the following details need to be redacted:

Addresses & locations
Associations & clubs
All social media links (LinkedIn, Credly etc)
Headshot/Images
Name
Name of Previous employers
Schools & universities
Dates, including durations (e.g. how long you were in a role)

Some of these points could be debated, however if the employer has requested ‘full employment history’ then surely this would quite easily allow the reviewer to determine the approximate age of the candidate. Even specifying qualifications you gained at school will give away your age dependent on whether you did O-levels or GCSE’s or NVQ’s for example. This seems somewhat of a minefield!

I’ve been struggling for a while on ways to make my CV less wordy, but I’m not sure how much is going to be left once redacted 😄

I don’t think a redacted CV will ever meet the GDPR irreversible anonymisation PII requirements, But as the writer you surely have an obligation to try?

If anyone has been through this process and has some guidance on how to write a redacted CV whilst not appearing deliberately vague then please leave a comment.