How to anonymize a CV: tool comparison (2026)

Four families of tools currently let you mask identity on a CV, with very different goals:

• BlindCV — a self-service tool: you drop a PDF in, and it comes back with the name replaced, the photo blurred, contact details masked and employers turned into generic descriptors ("large telecoms group"), the original layout intact and no file stored server-side.
• Affinda Resume Redactor — an online service and API aimed at companies. Affinda states that it masks name, location, age, previous employers, photo, links and school, and returns résumés "in the same original format", across 56 languages.
• MeVitae — a UK blind-recruiting solution that plugs into the ATS. It advertises more than 26 configurable bias parameters, "95%+" accuracy, preserved formatting, and above all a redaction that "replaces the word underneath the mask so it cannot be detected".
• The manual black box (Word, PDF preview, black highlighter) — free and universal, but technically the riskiest method (see below).

Two criteria separate a genuinely anonymized CV from one that merely looks the part: layout (does the tool edit the original PDF, or rebuild it at the risk of breaking the design?) and actual text deletion (the copy-paste test). The table below only records what each vendor documents publicly; a "not documented" cell flags unpublished information, not a proven shortcoming.

Two things stand out. First, MeVitae and BlindCV both claim genuine deletion of the text under the mask, where the black box fails. Second, only BlindCV turns employers into generic descriptors rather than simply erasing them, which keeps the career path readable.

Drawing a black rectangle on a CV does not delete the text: it hides it visually, nothing more. In most editors the words stay in the document's internal flow (the "content stream") and can be recovered with a plain select-all, copy and paste. The PDF Association and Adobe both stress that true redaction must remove the content from the file's internal structure, not cover it up.

Two further traps: metadata (the candidate's name often lingers in the file's Author/Title properties) stays untouched; and a photo covered by a mask is still there underneath, and still extractable. For HR use or for sharing with a client, those leaks are enough to re-identify the person.

The right choice depends on your volume and your context:

• A candidate, recruitment agency or in-house recruiter working self-service who wants a clean anonymized PDF, with no storage and transparent pricing → BlindCV is built for that (free for a first CV, then from €9).
• A high-volume company with an ATS (Workday, Taleo, iCIMS…) that wants anonymization industrialised at the source → MeVitae or Affinda, designed to sit inside the HR pipeline (pricing on request, not public).
• A one-off, free need → the black box will do visually, but keep it for a document that will never be re-processed, and never for sensitive data.

On the legal side, one clarification that often comes up: anonymizing a CV is not mandatory in France. The obligation set out in the 2006 act for companies with more than 50 employees never came into force for want of an implementing decree; the act of 17 August 2015 made the blind CV optional (article L. 1221-7 of the Labour Code). It remains a recommended anti-discrimination practice, to be combined with the data-relevance principles set out in the CNIL's recruitment guide.