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When it comes to the procedure of hiring employees, unconscious biases exist. In fact, 96% of recruiters feel that unconscious bias is a significant problem when hiring employees for jobs, and they are correct!
Regardless of how fair practice we try to play, our preconceived ideas regarding an ideal staff member will keep that from happening. The effectiveness of the selection process will be anything other than fair.
In a nutshell, biased hiring or blind recruitment typically results in an uneven playing field and creates inequality toward marginalized groups.
However, it's quite easy to diminish explicit biases. But how can one possess the ability to eliminate unconscious biases? Well, the most promising secret turns out to be the inclusion of resume redaction!
If you're wondering how to eliminate blind screening and get started with bias-free recruitment, you're in the right place. This guide will give you valuable insights on redacted resumes and how to redact information from a CV. Please keep reading until the end to learn more about it.
Let's get started!
Resume Redaction. What is it?
Resume redaction is a typical process of eliminating identifiable details from candidates' resumes. This unique technique is integrated as a part of blind hiring processes that reduces bias while hiring.
In a resume, you will find personally identifiable data that might lessen the chances of getting hired by a company or firm. And when such information is eliminated, the hiring managers can specifically make their decisions on skills and experience suitable for a particular position.
For instance, if you’ve mentioned something related to your gender or personality and don’t want the hiring managers to see it, you can easily remove it through redaction.
What are the Reasons to Redact Information from a Resume?
There are many reasons to redact a resume and some of these reasons are:
1. To remove personal information that could lead to discrimination based on age, gender, race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status.
2. To ensure that your resume is error-free and grammatically correct.
3. To tailor your resume to the specific job you are applying for, highlighting the skills and experience that are most relevant to the position.
4. To eliminate unnecessary information that could distract from your qualifications.
5. Present yourself in the best possible light and increase your chances of getting hired.
What Information can you Redact in a Resume?
When you redact a resume, it might seem pretty illogical to do so because it demonstrates a person’s skills and personality. But when you use a redacted resume, it will lessen the fluidity through which the data actually spreads after the employment and interview process.
Every individual wants all the potential employers to access their personal data and a resuming redacting tool will surely help in such situations.
Redacting a resume can be counter-intuitive to the outlook of a resume that traditionally showcases the personality and skills of an individual. But a redacted resume can reduce the fluidity with which data usually spreads after interview and employment processes.
Since everyone wants their personal information to be accessed by potential employers only, the resume redaction tool has become a matter of importance.
Some of the information that you can redact in a resume are:
- Personal Details
Personal details, including name, social media handles, images, etc., are generally removed from a redacted resume. Scammers and fraudsters can easily determine a candidate's image, gender, religion, age, ethnicity, etc.
Practices of protecting this sensitive information are prevalent in several countries. So, potential recruiters must refrain from allowing the above-mentioned traits to affect their hiring decisions. So when they're removed from the resume, you can rest assured that they won't influence the recruitment outcome.
Sometimes, age becomes a matter of concern in the workplace on both ends of the spectrum. Many recruiters assume that younger applicants need more experience, skills, or knowledge to do justice to a particular position. On the other hand, they also believe that older applicants need to be more capable of acquiring new skills.
So when age is redacted from resumes, hiring decisions can be entirely based on the relevant factors.
- Location and Addresses
Location or residential address is personal information and should only be disclosed once it's required. So if any resume happens to contain the address of a candidate, a redaction tool will remove it.
This is primarily because addresses can deliberately lead to discrimination if someone lives on the 'bad' side of the town. But that doesn't make the candidate any less qualified or potential for a particular job.
Therefore, it removes the risk of this kind of bias and enables those living in less fortunate areas to land excellent jobs.
How to Redact a Resume?
These days, redacting different file types are usually conducted through an effective redaction tool or software. Artificial intelligence and machine learning typically steered the automated procedure through techniques like natural language processing. It can efficiently help in identifying typical patterns within sensitive data.
Redacting software generally delivers a list of patterned information that can be either sensitive or confidential. Some of them include contact numbers, email addresses, bank account details, etc.
Redaction usually involves uploading resumes in the form of PDF files and manually identifying the information that needs to be redacted. Nevertheless, A.I.-driven redacting software can do the same while recognizing your sensitive data.
The Resume Redactor from Redactable was exquisitely designed to eliminate all the bias-inducing information about candidates from their resumes.
When you use this solution from Redactable, you can easily remove the following fields from a resume:
- Addresses
- Gender
- Images
- Work Progress or Details, including company name
- Personal details, including full name, contact number, email, and residential address
- Educational Qualifications
- Important Dates
- References, etc.
Step-By-Step Guide on Redacting a Resume with Redactable
If you are unfamiliar with redacting a resume with Redactable, we are here to help. We will explain how to redact a resume in 4 easy steps using Redactable:
- Firstly, you must upload the resume you wish to redact in PDF format to Redactable.
- Secondly, you can choose Manual Redaction or Auto-Redaction to identify sensitive information within a candidate's resume.
- Thirdly, you need to review the list of all the items provided by the software. You can proceed by selecting the ones that you wish to redact. If you wish to redact all the items, you need to check the Select All option and redact them all.
- Finally, you can view your redacted document and download the redacted PDF file.
What are the Benefits of Resume Redaction?
With the ever-increasing fraudulence happening in the digital world, redacting resumes has become an important aspect. While recruiters redact thousands of resumes daily, we've listed some of the compelling benefits of resume redaction. Some of them are:
- Eliminate or Reduce Bias
Most recruiters take pride in not allowing bias to get in the way of their decision-making procedure. Unfortunately, they need to become more familiar with and aware of unconscious bias. Nevertheless, blind hiring is the only process that can seamlessly reduce the presence of unconscious bias.
When little information on the candidate's name, age, educational background, ethnicity, etc., decision-makers aren't left with any choice. Instead, they solely focus on the skills and experience of the candidates.
- Fair Hiring Process
All HR managers look forward to ensuring that their department carries out nothing other than fair hiring processes. And the redacted resumes help level the playing field by reviewing and stripping all the unnecessary information. So the original resume file eliminates everything other than the relevant information.
- Diminishes Conflicts of Interest
Sometimes, the process of recruiting might become tricky for several reasons. For instance, an internal applicant might apply, and there might be occurrences of unconscious bias. So for such cases, it's important for recruiters to prove a fair process.
Recruiters can easily use resume redaction while planning to redact a resume so that no recruiting decisions are biased. You can confidently tell your manager that all the hiring decisions were made on suitability.
- Less Time for Hiring
Another reason why many hiring panels enjoy reviewing and focusing only on redacted resumes is because it takes less time. It's because there needs to be more information, and a thorough background check is also unnecessary.
So the recruiters can review resumes way faster, thereby speeding the candidate screening and recruiting procedure.
- Remove Personal Contact Information
Last but not least, resume redaction software also provides an added benefit. A typical redacting feature can review and remove all the contact information. This means you can upload a perfectly redacted resume, and your clients can easily contact the right candidates.
You should redact a resume when you don’t want the recruiters to gain much information about confidential information. When all the sensitive and personal information from the resume gets removed, it will help recruiters decide based on your work experience and skills. You need an effective tool like Redactable to make resume redaction easy for you.
What are the Benefits of using Redactable for Resume Redaction?
Some of the most commendable benefits of using Redactable for resume redaction are:
- Provides Auto-Redaction: Redactable is the only redaction software with the option for true auto-redaction. Other competing redaction software offers semi-automatic redaction tools where sensitive information must be strung together manually. But Redactable has an option for single-click redaction that provides a completely redacted document within a few seconds.
- Highly Secured: Redactable never stores your data while redacting. It permanently deletes the data since it employs data and meta-data removal. However, it is not apparent to the end-user and should be removed on the back end.
- Includes Built-in Integrations: Redactable and efficiently import documents from various services, including Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.
Some of the other benefits of Redactable are:
- It permanently removes metadata and any other elements of the hidden document. This, in return, provides you with a completely secure document with zero scopes for data manipulation or theft.
- It remains applicable to various industries, including Finance, Legal, Insurance, Real Estate, Government, Healthcare, etc.
- Redaction certificates are generated after each redaction procedure.
- The Optical Character Reader/Recognition (O.C.R.) and Natural Language Processing (N.L.P.) of Redactable are backed by Artificial Intelligence.
Conclusion
The significant increase in demand for redaction has led many people to use an auto-redaction tool for their redaction needs.
Redactable is a highly efficient web-based application that allows companies to redact confidential information from resumes. As Machine Learning powers it, it automates the procedure of redaction by identifying phrases, keywords, and patterns that are predicted to be confidential.
While Redactable doesn't employ data masking, you can seamlessly edit and remove texts from resumes. And since it uses Natural Language Processing (NLP), you can remove all the sensitive data with a single click.
Check out the pricing of Redactable to redact a resume and learn about the enterprise and individual costs.
Click here to try Redactable, the best resume redaction tool for free!
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