You signed an NDA, and the best line on your CV is a figure you are not allowed to print. That is a common bind for people coming out of banking, consulting, pharma or any firm with a legal team that reads contracts closely. The good news is that most of the persuasive power of a number survives when you remove the number itself.
This is not legal advice. Your NDA, your employment contract and any exit paperwork are the authority here, so read them before you decide what goes on the page. What follows is how to present impact once you know where the line sits.
What the raw figure was doing for you
Before you replace a number, work out what job it was doing. A recruiter does not care that revenue reached 41.2 million. They care that you moved something big, that you moved it a lot, and that you were close enough to the work to know the result. Each of those can be carried without the exact amount.
General advice on putting numbers on achievements is covered in our guide to quantifying achievements on your CV, so this piece skips the basics and stays on one case: the figure exists, you know it, and you have promised not to share it.
Ask three short questions about each confidential metric:
- Scale: how big was the thing you worked on?
- Change: how much did it move because of you?
- Position: how did it compare with peers, targets or the previous year?
Usually only one of these is truly sensitive. Revenue for a private company is secret; the fact that it grew by roughly a fifth often is not. Keep what you can and drop what you cannot.
Five substitutes for a figure you cannot print
Percentages and ratios
A relative change says nothing about the absolute base. "Cut onboarding time by 35 percent" reveals no headcount, no budget and no client. Ratios work the same way: "halved the cost per claim" or "tripled conversion on the renewal flow" are honest and readable. Be careful with very small bases, though. A 400 percent rise on a pilot with six users invites a question you might not want to answer in the interview.
Ranges and bands
When the absolute amount is the point, give a band wide enough to protect it. "Managed a portfolio in the 50 to 100 million euro range" tells a hiring manager what level you operate at without matching any line in an annual report. If a narrow range would let a competitor work backwards, widen it.
Orders of magnitude
Sometimes a single word does the work: "an eight-figure budget", "a team of several hundred", "millions of transactions a month". This is the bluntest tool and the safest. It is also less vivid, so pair it with a percentage when you can: "an eight-figure procurement budget, with a 12 percent saving in the first full year".
Ranks and relative position
Internal rankings are often less sensitive than the data behind them. "Top region out of 14 for two consecutive years" or "highest client retention in the division" show performance against peers with no money on the page. Check that the ranking itself was not circulated as confidential.
Time and effort
Speed and effort are rarely covered by an NDA. "Delivered the migration four months ahead of plan" or "closed the audit backlog in one quarter" carry real weight and almost never need redacting.
Replace the number with the thing the number proved. A recruiter remembers "top of 14 regions" longer than a figure they cannot check anyway.
Naming clients without naming them
Client names are often the most tightly protected item in a consulting or agency contract, and the one candidates are most tempted to drop in. The fix is a descriptor that gives the reader the same information a logo would: sector, scale, geography and sometimes reputation.
Some patterns that work:
- "a top-five European bank"
- "a FTSE 100 retailer" or "a Fortune 500 insurer"
- "a national rail operator"
- "a mid-sized pharmaceutical group with operations in 30 countries"
Two warnings. First, a descriptor can be so precise that it names the client anyway. "The largest Dutch airline" is a name with extra steps. If only one or two companies fit, loosen it. Second, do not inflate. Calling a regional lender "a leading European bank" is the kind of stretch that unravels at reference stage, and it costs more trust than the missing name ever would.
If you worked on a project that was later announced publicly, the public announcement is fair to describe in its own terms. Your inside detail on it is still covered.
What your CV tells the reader about you
This is the part most advice skips. A hiring manager who reads your CV is not only checking your results. They are watching how you treat the last employer's information, because in a few months it will be theirs.
A CV that names confidential clients, prints internal revenue or describes an unreleased product tells the reader something you did not mean to say: this person shares things. For roles in finance, legal, M&A, healthcare or anything with market-sensitive data, that alone can end the application. Nobody writes "candidate seems indiscreet" in the rejection email. They simply move on.
The reverse is also true. A line like "led pricing for a top-three telecom operator in Southern Europe, lifting margin by several points" reads as someone who has done serious work and knows how to talk about it. Discretion is a skill employers pay for, and the way you write your CV is the first evidence of it.
One small move helps here. If an interviewer pushes for the exact figure, a calm "that one is covered by my NDA, but I can tell you it was the largest account in the region" is a strong answer. It shows the boundary and the substance in the same breath. You can prepare that sentence in advance for each redacted line.
Checks before you send it
Run through these before the CV goes anywhere:
- Reread the NDA and the contract. Some agreements cover client names but not results; others cover everything about a named project. Some have an end date. If the wording is unclear, ask the former employer or a lawyer, not a forum.
- Check what is already public. Press releases, annual reports and conference talks can be described in their own words. Your private knowledge about them stays private.
- Test for reverse engineering. Read each line as a competitor would. If the range, the sector and the date together point to one company and one deal, loosen one of them.
- Keep it consistent across documents. A CV that says "a top-five bank" next to a LinkedIn profile that names the bank undoes the effort. The same goes for portfolio links and cover letters.
- Keep your private notes. Write down the real numbers for yourself, so you can speak accurately in interview within the limits you have set.
If you build your CV from your LinkedIn profile with a tool like Postulit, review the imported experience lines with this list in mind. Profiles written years ago often contain details you would phrase differently today.
A quick before and after
Here is one bullet rewritten, using an invented example.
Before: "Grew Acme Bank's SME lending book from 210 million to 260 million euros in 2023 by redesigning the credit scoring model."
After: "Redesigned the SME credit scoring model for a top-ten European bank, growing the lending book by close to a quarter in one year."
The second version loses the client name and both figures. It keeps the scale, the size of the change, the timeframe and your role in it. Most readers will not notice anything is missing, and the ones who do will note that you knew what to hold back.
Your next step
Take your current CV and highlight every number, client name and project name in it. For each one, decide whether it is public, covered by your NDA, or unclear. Rewrite the covered ones with a percentage, a band, a rank or an order of magnitude, and send the unclear ones to whoever can answer them. Then prepare one interview sentence for each redacted line, so the boundary sounds deliberate when someone asks.