Sending a candidate's CV to a client is one of the riskiest moments in the recruitment process. If the CV contains the candidate's direct contact details — email, phone number, LinkedIn — the client can contact the candidate directly, cutting you out of the placement entirely. Beyond the commercial risk, sharing a full CV also raises data protection questions about what personal information you're transmitting and on what legal basis.
Redacting a CV before client submission is the standard practice among professional recruitment agencies — but many recruiters still do it manually, inconsistently, or not at all. This guide explains what to redact, why, and how to do it efficiently.
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The most immediate commercial reason: if a client can contact the candidate directly, they can bypass your agency and hire without paying a placement fee. This happens more often than agencies like to admit — not always maliciously, but simply because the candidate's email is right there in the document.
Removing direct contact information from the CV before submission protects your fee without creating friction in the client relationship. You're still presenting the candidate's full professional profile — you're just ensuring any contact goes through you.
Under GDPR, sharing a candidate's personal data with a third party (the client) requires a valid legal basis and appropriate data processing agreements. Sending a full CV — including name, address, phone, email, and LinkedIn — to every client who requests candidates creates a broad personal data footprint that can be hard to manage and document.
By redacting contact details before submission, you reduce the personal data you're sharing and simplify your data flow documentation.
Candidates trust recruiters with their personal information. Many are actively employed and don't want their contact details circulating beyond the recruiter they've engaged. Demonstrating that you redact CVs before client submission is a meaningful trust signal — and increasingly a differentiator in competitive candidate markets.
Client submission redaction is different from blind hiring redaction. For client submission, you want to remove contact information that enables direct approach — but you want to keep the professional profile intact, including name (usually) and career history.
Some agencies also remove the candidate's name from client submissions — presenting candidates as "Candidate A", "Candidate B" — to prevent clients from searching for the candidate online and making direct contact via LinkedIn. This is increasingly common for senior or hard-to-find candidates.
One redaction that almost everyone misses: DOCX files contain embedded metadata including the author's name — the name of whoever created or last saved the document. Even if you remove all visible contact information from the CV, a client who checks File → Properties in Word will see the candidate's name.
NullifyCV removes file metadata as part of the client submission redaction profile — eliminating this often-overlooked data leak.
Opening each CV in Word or a PDF editor and manually deleting or covering contact information takes 3-10 minutes per file. It's inconsistent, error-prone, and leaves no audit trail. For agencies processing 20+ CVs per week it's not sustainable.
The whole process takes under 30 seconds. Files are processed entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded to any server, so you're not creating additional data exposure by using the tool.
The most effective approach is to make redaction a mandatory step in your submission process — not something individual consultants do inconsistently. A few practical suggestions:
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