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by anonymouskimmer 1227 days ago
Sure. Which would require a specialized group of trained people at the company. This would involve such things as changing Alma Mater University to "completed degree". It would involve fudging things such as how long it took to graduate (which can be an indicator of familial status, in so far as people from poorer backgrounds are disproportionately likely to take longer to complete due to financial reasons).

Genuinely anonymizing an application is a difficult task without losing pertinent data.

1 comments

Both of the things you listed are as simple as text replacement.
And how do you replace this text without losing important, non-origin context? What you probably need is an entire re-write. But a re-write, or even a bad text replacement, can make it look like the applicant is better or worse at grammar or writing in general.

This is not as easy a task as a simple text replacement.

The important content is their work history, projects, technical skills, etc. If the rewriting is awkward, it's affecting all candidates uniformly.
A genuine bad rewrite would tend to affect all candidates uniformly (except those who have pre-anonymized their applications, thus gaming the process), but a find-replace is more problematic.
If that's an issue, the companies could just tell applicants to pre anonymize their resumes to eliminate any potential gaming.
I think it's worthwhile A/B testing your idea.