Digitas UK makes Anon CV available to recruiters

Digitas has made public its free CV anonymisation tool, Anon CV, which automatically removes details from CVs that can trigger bias in the hiring process, so recruiters can focus on finding the right talent for the job.

Since the tool launched, Digitas has saved more than 500 hours on recruitment so far this year and the agency is now making it available, free and open source, to employers everywhere.

Dani Bassil, Digitas CEO, said: “We created Anon CV to streamline our recruitment process, and ensure we’re bringing in the right talent to help our clients future-proof their businesses. Candidates should be hired on their skills, experience and the contribution they can make, it’s a no brainer. With this brilliant tool we’re finding the right talent quicker, and without bias. And we wanted to share that with employers everywhere.” 

Anonymising CVs has been shown by research to improve the selection of candidates from underrepresented groups and Digitas’ HR team had been doing this manually when recruiting new talent, spending at least 20 minutes per CV. Looking to expedite and simplify this process, the team enlisted the agency’s tech experts to develop such a tool. 

Thanks to its extensive in-house tech capabilities, Digitas developed Anon CV, which integrates with the Smart Recruiters platform. The code has been made available for free on GitHub and is open source so that developers can adapt the tool for their platform and modify the source code.

Once set up, it automatically and quickly anonymises the parts of a CV that could trigger recruitment bias such as name, education, gender, ethnic background, age and career breaks. The tool then reformats the document, ensuring it is still easy to read and comprehend, allowing recruiters to concentrate on the key factors in hiring candidates – skills, experience, and achievements. 

To promote the free tool, Digitas designed and built a website featuring more information about the tool and recruitment biases and created a LinkedIn campaign directing recruiters and HR teams to find out more. For more information please visit: anonCV.org