What to remove from a CV before client submission

Last updated: June 2026.

Before a candidate CV goes to a client, recruiters should remove five things: the candidate's contact details, photo, date of birth and nationality, salary information, references, and the formatting junk that breaks ATS parsing. Each removal protects either your fee, the candidate, or the document itself. Here is the why behind every item.

Why remove the candidate's contact details?

This is the one removal with a direct commercial consequence for the agency. A CV that reaches the client with the candidate's email address, phone number, or personal LinkedIn URL on it lets anyone who sees it contact the candidate directly — the hiring manager, an internal recruiter, or a third party the document gets forwarded to. Your terms of business may protect the fee on paper, but enforcing them after a back-channel approach is slow, awkward and damages the client relationship. Replace the candidate's contact block with your consultant's name, phone and email, so every conversation routes through the agency. This also has a candidate-protection side: the candidate gave you their details for one purpose, and uncontrolled forwarding of those details around a client organisation is exactly the kind of processing GDPR expects you to minimise.

Why remove the photo, date of birth, and nationality?

These three carry bias risk and compliance risk in one package. A photo invites judgements about age, ethnicity, and appearance that have nothing to do with competence; date of birth enables age discrimination; nationality invites assumptions about right to work that should be verified properly, not guessed from a CV line. UK and EU equality law makes hiring decisions influenced by these attributes legally dangerous for your client — and an agency that forwards them on every submission makes itself part of the problem. Under GDPR's data-minimisation principle, you should only pass on personal data that is necessary for the purpose; a photo and a birth date rarely are. Many continental European candidates include both by habit, so this step catches something on a large share of intake CVs. Blind-screening policies at enterprise clients increasingly make this removal mandatory rather than optional.

Should salary information stay on the CV?

No. Candidates sometimes list current salary or expectations on the CV itself, and forwarding that to a client weakens everyone's position. It anchors the client's offer to the candidate's current package rather than the role's value, it can undercut the salary the candidate actually wants, and it removes the recruiter's room to negotiate — which is part of the service the client pays for. Salary expectations belong in your conversation with the client, framed with context: market rate, competing processes, notice period. There is also a fairness angle: several US states and a growing number of European employers prohibit using salary history in offers, and pay-transparency rules in the EU are moving the same way. Strip salary lines from the document and handle compensation where it belongs — in the negotiation you manage.

Do references belong on a submitted CV?

Remove them, for two reasons. First, referee details are someone else's personal data: a candidate pasting their former manager's name, email and phone number onto a CV did not get that person's consent for it to circulate around your client's organisation. Forwarding it multiplies the exposure. Second, timing: references should be taken at offer stage, by you, in a structured way — not cold-called by a hiring manager mid-process, which can expose a confidential job search and burn the candidate's relationships. The line "References available on request" adds nothing and dates the document; delete it too. If your agency provides reference summaries as part of the service, deliver them as a separate, controlled document at the right stage of the process, never as a CV appendix.

What formatting junk should you strip?

Beyond personal data, clean out everything that breaks parsing or slows the reader down: text boxes and layout tables (the top cause of scrambled ATS imports), two-column layouts, skill-rating bars and icon fonts, headers and footers carrying real content, embedded images, decorative fonts, and inconsistent date formats. Replace novelty section names ("My Journey", "What I Bring") with standard headings an ATS recognises — Work Experience, Education, Skills. Fix the small things that reflect on the agency: spelling, tense consistency, unexplained gaps left ambiguous. The output should be a single-column, standard-heading document in your branded template, exported as DOCX or text-based PDF. Our ATS-safe CV templates checklist covers the template side of this in detail.

What should stay on the CV?

Removal has a failure mode of its own: stripping so much that the client cannot evaluate the candidate. Everything that carries professional signal stays — full work history with employer names and dates (unless you are running a strict blind process in a small market), quantified achievements, technologies and certifications, education, languages, and a professional summary that frames the career. Keep the candidate's own wording for achievements where it is strong; clients can tell the difference between a person's track record and a recruiter's gloss. Location can usually stay at city level, since commute feasibility is a legitimate screening question, while the full home address never adds value. The test for every line is simple: does this help the client answer "can this person do the job?" If yes, it stays. If it only helps the reader identify, contact, or form a prejudice about the candidate, it goes.

How do you keep removal consistent across the team?

A checklist only protects you if it runs on every submission, including the 6:45pm one before a client deadline. Manual processes degrade exactly there: each consultant remembers a slightly different list, new starters copy whoever trained them, and the footer phone number gets missed under pressure. The fix is the same as for formatting generally — write the standard down once (what is removed, what stays, which clients get strict blind format), attach it to the template rather than the person, and automate the application so the clean version is the default output rather than a discipline. It is also worth auditing occasionally: pull ten recent submissions and check them against the list. Most agencies that do this for the first time find at least one live CV with a personal mobile number still in it — which is the cheapest possible way to learn the lesson.

The pre-submission removal checklist

Can you automate the clean-up?

Yes — and at volume you probably should. Doing this checklist by hand on every submission is 20-40 minutes of editing per CV, and manual redaction is error-prone: one missed mobile number in a footer undoes the whole exercise. FormaCV's CV anonymisation feature removes contact details, photos, and the identifiers you configure as part of the formatting pass itself — you choose per template what gets redacted, and every CV that goes through comes out branded, ATS-safe, and cleaned, in about 60 seconds at $0.99 per CV. It is one step in a broader workflow where you use CV formatting with AI instead of editing documents by hand. For the compliance reasoning behind each redaction, see our GDPR CV anonymisation guide.