How to redact a CV or salary screenshot

A recruiter sharing a candidate's CV and a job-seeker posting their own offer face the same job. Cover every identifying field with a solid, fully opaque block, export a brand-new flattened image, then check it before you send. Do not blur or pixelate, because the fields you most want to hide, a phone number, a date of birth, a reference number, are short strings in a known font, and that is exactly what a solver rebuilds. Keep the substance you are actually sharing, the skills and the salary figure, and hide the person: full name, home address, personal phone and email, date of birth, any ID or reference number, a photo, and on an offer the signatures. Do it on your Mac, not on a web tool that uploads the file first.

What to hide, and what to keep

The mistake I see most is redacting the wrong thing: someone blacks out the salary figure they meant to share, or leaves a reference number in a header they never scrolled to. So decide field by field. The point of sharing a CV to a hiring panel, or an offer to a mentor, is the substance, the skills and the number. The risk is everything that ties that substance to a named, contactable, real person. Hide the second, keep the first.

The two cases this covers

A recruiter sharing a candidate. You have a CV as a screenshot or an exported image and you are sending it to a hiring panel, a client, or a job board. You want the panel to judge the skills, not the name, the photo or the address, both to protect the candidate and to cut bias out of the shortlist. So you anonymize: cover the name, photo, contact block and anything that reveals the current employer, and leave the experience intact.

A job-seeker sharing an offer. You want to post a salary or offer-letter screenshot to a comparison thread, a subreddit, or a mentor, to sanity-check the number. Here you keep the figure and the job title and strip your identity off it: your name, the company name and logo, the signature block, your address and any reference number. The goal is that the number is readable and nothing on the image leads back to you or gets your employer's confidential terms into the wild.

Why blurring these fields is the wrong move

Blurring feels gentle and safe, and for these documents it is the worst choice you can make. The fields you are hiding are short, structured, and set in a predictable font: a phone number, a date of birth, a National Insurance or reference number, a name. That is precisely the input a de-pixelation solver handles best.

In 2022 Dan Petro at Bishop Fox released Unredacter, which reconstructs pixelated text by rendering each candidate string in the same font, re-pixelating the guess with the same settings, and matching it against the image, character by character. It builds on an earlier tool, Depix. Pixelation is a fixed, local mapping, so there is a puzzle to solve, and it is strongest on short text in a known font. A blur is a weaker version of the same thing and a low-radius one can be estimated back. I go into what can and cannot be recovered in whether you can reverse a blurred or pixelated image. The short answer for a CV: assume a phone number or a date of birth you blurred can be read.

Two more traps carry straight over from how to redact a screenshot on a Mac. A black box that stays a separate layer is not a deletion: in 2019 lawyers for Paul Manafort filed a court document whose blacked-out passages could be selected and copied straight out. And a box traced tightly around a word leaks its length: in the Ghislaine Maxwell documents, the width of the covering bars, read against a word index at the back, helped reporters narrow down redacted names. On a CV a bar that hugs a surname or a company name tells the reader roughly what it is. Cover generously.

The safe way to do it on a Mac

Work on the image, cover with an opaque fill, and flatten it into a new file.

1. Open the CV or offer screenshot in Preview and show the Markup toolbar.
2. Choose the rectangle shape, set its fill to solid black and its opacity to 100 percent. Skip the highlighter, which applies ink below full opacity and can be read back by pushing brightness and contrast.
3. Cover each field from the list above. Cover generously, past the edges of the text, so the block does not trace the length of a name or a number.
4. Flatten it. Go to File, then Export, and save a fresh PNG. Do not save over the original, which is how the aCropalypse bug (CVE-2023-21036) left cropped-out data recoverable inside the file on other platforms.
5. Crop off any margins or headers you did not need to include in the first place. Less on the image is less to leak.

A PDF CV is a different job

The steps above are for a screenshot or an exported image. If you are sharing the original PDF instead, do not draw a box on it. A rectangle placed over a PDF sits on top of live, selectable text, so the recipient can highlight and copy the words straight out from behind it. Use real redaction that deletes the underlying text: Preview and Adobe Acrobat both have a redaction tool that removes the content rather than covering it. Better still for a public post, take a screenshot of the finished page and treat it as an image with the method above, so there is no text layer at all.

Check before you send

Open the file you are about to share, not the one you were editing. Zoom all the way in on each covered field and look for edges of text peeking out. Push brightness and contrast to their extremes and look for ghosting. Try to select and copy over a blacked-out area, and you should get nothing. Confirm the name, the address and every short number is gone, and that the salary figure or the skills you meant to keep are still readable. Thirty seconds here is the difference between a clean share and a leaked candidate.

How ScrubShot handles it

The manual route works, but it is fiddly and easy to get half right, so I built ScrubShot to make the safe path the default. Press Fn + Space and it captures the whole screen with ScreenCaptureKit and opens it in an editor, where you crop afterwards rather than fighting a drag selection.

The Scrub tool is the part I care about for a document like this. A normal pixelate sets each block to the average of the pixels beneath it, which is the signal Depix and Unredacter exploit, and the reason a blurred phone number is not safe. ScrubShot does not do that. It uses a content-independent scramble: each block is filled with the average of a few pixels sampled at random from across the whole selected region, so the pattern is decoupled from whatever sat underneath. It looks like a redaction and holds the rough colors of the area, but there is no per-block relationship to the original text to solve for. It reverses to nothing by design, and the scrub is baked straight into the image, so the original pixels are gone, not hidden on a layer.

From there you can add a solid block over a photo or a signature, crop the margins, undo with ⌘Z, then Copy and Save. Finished images go to a dedicated folder at ~/Pictures/ScrubShot and to the clipboard, and the saved PNG contains only the scrubbed result.

The capture, scrub and share flow makes no network connections, so a CV with a candidate's address in it, or your own offer letter, never leaves your Mac, which an online redaction tool cannot say because it has to receive the file first. ScrubShot runs on macOS 14 and later, on both Apple Silicon and Intel, and it needs Screen Recording and Accessibility permission to capture the screen and to see the Fn shortcut.

FAQ

What should I hide on a CV before sharing it?

Hide the person, keep the substance. Cover the full name (if you are anonymizing), home address, personal phone, personal email, date of birth, any ID or reference number, the photo, and the current employer if it would identify the candidate. Leave the skills, job titles and experience visible, because that is the part you are actually sharing.

How do I hide my name and salary source on an offer-letter screenshot?

Keep the number you want feedback on and hide everything that ties it to you. Cover your name, the company name and logo, the signature block, your address, and any reference or employee number. Do it with a solid opaque block, not a blur, then export a fresh image. The salary figure and job title can stay, since that is the point of the post.

Should I blur or black out the details?

Black them out with a solid, fully opaque fill, never blur or pixelate. The highest-risk fields on a CV or offer are short structured strings in a known font, like a phone number, a date of birth or a reference number, and those are exactly what a solver reconstructs from a pixelation. A blur is a weaker version of the same mistake.

Is my CV a PDF or an image, and does it matter?

It matters a lot. If you are sharing a screenshot or an exported image, cover the fields with an opaque block and export a new flattened file. If you are sending the original PDF, use Preview or Acrobat's real redaction, which deletes the underlying text, because a black box drawn over a PDF still has the live text sitting behind it that anyone can select and copy.

Does ScrubShot upload my screenshots?

No. The capture, scrub and share flow makes no network connections, so a CV or an offer never leaves your Mac, unlike an online redaction tool that has to receive the file first. The app contacts a server only for the trial check, license activation and update checks, and those requests carry a hashed machine identifier and your license key, never any image data.