Is your résumé leaking personal data?
Picture someone we'll call Maya. She's quietly job-hunting while still employed, and she polishes her résumé on her lunch break — on her work laptop, in the company's copy of Word. She sends the file to a dozen openings. What she doesn't realise is that the document is carrying more than her work history.
What a résumé file remembers
A .docx or .pdf keeps a surprising trail:
- Author & last-edited-by — often your full name and your work account.
- Company/organisation — the name baked in by whatever license created the file.
- Edit timestamps — when it was created and last touched (a Tuesday at 12:40, say).
- Tracked changes & comments — the phrasing you tried and deleted, or a note to yourself.
- Invisible characters — the odd zero-width character copied in from a template.
A curious hiring manager doesn't need any special tools to notice that "last modified by CORP\\m.maya" — and now they know where you currently work and that you wrote your application on the clock.
Check it before you apply
The fix is simply to look before you send. Drop your résumé into scrub, and it reads the file on your own device — nothing is uploaded — and lists exactly what's inside: author and company metadata, tracked changes, comments, hidden text, and any invisible characters. A plain Suspicious or Clean verdict tells you at a glance whether it's safe to send.
For Word and PDF files, scrub shows you what's there so you can fix it — usually by exporting a fresh copy (Word's "Inspect Document" or a clean PDF export strips most of it) and re-checking. For any images in your résumé — a headshot, a logo — scrub removes their metadata for you, losslessly.
The short version
Your résumé is the one file you send to strangers on purpose. Give it a ten-second check first so it says exactly what you want it to — and nothing else. Get scrub free and check yours now.