Unconscious bias can unintentionally influence hiring decisions. The Anonymous mode feature in Teamtailor can help your recruitment be more fair by masking identifying information in candidate profiles. This allows you to focus on the candidate's skills, experience, and potential.

Anonymous mode is an optional safeguard you can choose to use in your hiring process. It helps reduce the risk of unconscious bias while keeping full responsibility, judgment, and decision-making with the hiring team.

Anonymous mode is typically enabled in one or several stages during the first part of the recruitment process. Once enabled, the system will mask identifying details on the candidate profiles in that stage(s) to help support a more objective evaluation of them.

Anonymous mode can be set up when creating a job or job template under the Stages step. Under Stage actions you will see the option to enable Anonymous mode.

Another way to enable the anonymous mode is directly in the process of an existing job. Navigate to the stage in question and open the ⋮ stage options. Here, toggle on Anonymous mode.

When you enable Anonymous mode on the Inbox stage of your recruitment process, the candidate will be informed about this when submitting their job application.

When a candidate is in an anonymous stage of a job, the system will mask personal information. That way, you will be able to focus on the candidate's qualities, rather than other less important factors.

When viewing a masked candidate card, the following personal data will be masked:

The candidate’s name and profile picture are replaced with a unique and anonymous pseudonym. Using a combination of colors and animals, you can still easily refer to a specific candidate. For example: “Did you get a chance to review Green Bear’s work experience?”

Free-text mentions of the candidate's name and email will be replaced with “masked in anonymous mode” in the following sections:

In anonymous mode, the resume is hidden by default. Users can click Show full resume to view a redacted version in which personal information is masked.

In the redacted version, the system will block out the candidate’s name, email address, phone number, and any image.

If the system cannot mask certain information, typically because of the file format, a message will inform you of this. You will then only be able to view the original resume with personal information visible by clicking Show full resume.

Candidate or internal documents are not redacted, but hidden by default.

When you click Show documents, you will be able to see the file names and open them.

When using the Share candidate feature, the candidate remains masked. The share link and emails sent to external recipients will use the candidate’s pseudonym instead of their actual name.
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When sharing a candidate in anonymous mode, users can choose to share the redacted resume. This option is unchecked by default and includes a tooltip to help set the right expectations.

The candidate and internal documents options for job application data are also unchecked by default. When hovering over them, a message is displayed to indicate that these items are not redacted.
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When a candidate is in an anonymous stage for all the job applications that a user can access, the candidate will appear as masked in the list under the Candidates tab.

When sorting by Name or email, masked candidates are excluded from the sorting.

When the time is right, you can move a candidate from an anonymous to a non-anonymous stage. When you do this, all masked data will be revealed.