Anonymous CVs may finally happen

Jobseekers in France could be free to withhold key information from potential employers, including their age and nationality, until they are called for an interview, under a scheme that could come into force next year.

The government will decide in January whether anonymous CVs should finally be made compulsory in every business employing more than 50 staff, five years after a law was passed to that effect.

The initiative was supposed to have applied to all large employers since 2006, as part of a law combatting unfair discrimination by recruiters, but the government never signed the decree to make the law take effect.

It relaunched the initiative last November, with a pilot scheme involving major companies including La Poste, L’Oréal, Citroën, Axa, Coca Cola and BNP Paribas in seven departments: the Seine-Saint-Denis, Nord, Rhône, Bouches-du-Rhône, Bas-Rhin, Loire-Atlantique and Paris.

The Pôle Emploi national jobs agency sent 19,000 letters to companies with more than 50 employees in the chosen departments, inviting them to join the experiment.

Immigration minister Eric Besson said the response from firms had “exceeded our expectations”. More than 800 companies expressed an interest in trying out anonymous CVs, while the government was expecting only 100 at first.

The CVs can either be provided anonymously by the applicant, leaving just a contact phone number, or the identifying details removed by the Pôle Emploi, recruitment agency or the HR department at a participating company. Contact details remain on file, but are not passed on to those who are sifting through the applications. The only information that remains visible to recruiters are details about the applicant’s skills, qualifications, experience and training. The anonymity is lifted at the first interview.

Pôle Emploi has been analysing the results and talking to employers and jobseekers about their experiences of the scheme. The group will pass a report to the government shortly that will allow it to make a decision in January on whether to pursue the initiative.

The scheme does not guarantee a job, but aims to help people get over the first hurdle and be interviewed. Opponents, however, say it will make no difference: discrimination will still occur, but at a later stage in the recruitment process, during the interviews. They say the effort would be better spent on offering more comprehensive training for recruiters and imposing sanctions on those that break the rules.

Mr Besson is also looking at the case for tightening anti-discrimination laws to include a new criteria: place of residence. He says some job applicants are turned down because they live in less well-off areas, such as the cités (housing estates).