PDF Tools for HR & Recruitment
Offer letters, onboarding packets and candidate files: merge, sign, redact and compare them
These PDF tools for HR and recruitment help you prepare offer letters, onboarding packets and candidate files, and remove personal data before a document is shared. They are free and need no account, and this page shows which tools keep a file in your browser, which matters for employee records.
Recommended Tools
Merge PDF
Assemble an onboarding packet (offer letter, handbook, forms) into one PDF, in the order you choose, without the files leaving your browser.
Sign PDF
Add a drawn, typed or imported signature, or your initials, to an offer letter. The signature is an image on the page, with no certificate, timestamp or audit trail.
Redact PDF
Draw boxes over a home address, a phone number or a salary before you share a resume or a file; the text under each box is removed from the page, not just covered.
Protect PDF
Encrypt pay stubs, contracts or performance reviews with AES-256, so that the password is required to open them.
Compare PDF
Highlight words added or removed between two versions of a contract or a policy, in your browser; word order and repeated words are ignored, so check the documents too.
Organize PDF
Reorder, rotate or delete the pages of a scanned file before you archive it, once the last thumbnail has appeared.
Extract PDF Pages
Share only the pages a manager needs from a long personnel file. What those pages share with the others, such as the other half of a two-page spread, can stay inside the new file, unseen.
Common Use Cases
- Build an onboarding packet from several documents
- Sign an offer letter or a contract amendment
- Remove a candidate's contact details from a resume before passing it on
- Password-protect pay stubs before emailing them
- Check the changes between two versions of an employment contract
- Put scanned forms in the right order and orientation
Personal data: which tools keep files in your browser
HR files often contain personal data, so it helps to know where each step happens. Merge, Organize, Extract Pages, Compare, Sign, Watermark and Page Numbers run entirely in your browser: the document is processed on your device and not sent anywhere.
Redact, Protect, Compress, Edit, PDF to Word, Word to PDF, Unlock and Chat with PDF send the file over HTTPS to our server on AWS in Paris, which processes it and deletes it at the end of the task. Some of them, such as Word to PDF and Protect, go through a temporary file that is deleted right after. The chat keeps the document text and the conversation in your tab and sends them with each question; the server keeps neither once it has answered. Edit sends a PDF of up to 4 MB in full when it opens and after each change; a larger PDF is not sent.
Whether a tool is acceptable for a given document is for your organization's data policy to decide.
Redaction: check the result before you share
Redact PDF works with boxes you draw by hand on each page; it does not search the text or detect personal data for you. When you apply it, the text under the boxes is removed from the page, not just covered: none of it is left under a box to see, select or copy, and the form fields, comments and links under a box are removed too.
- Open the downloaded file, try to select or copy the text where a box was, and check that the lines next to each box are complete.
- Check the document properties: the title and author are not changed.
- Look at bookmarks, the files attached to the document, and the comments and form fields outside the boxes: they stay in the file, except the replies to a comment that a box removed. In a tagged PDF, the accessibility tags lose the redacted text too, except in rare cases.
- Review every page, since the tool shows no preview of the result before the download.
Offer letters and signatures
Sign PDF places an image of your signature, drawn, typed or imported, that you can move and resize with eight handles. It has no certificate, timestamp or audit trail, so when a process requires a certified electronic signature, use a service that provides one.
The signatures you create are kept only for the current session and disappear when the page reloads. After signing, the "File ready" panel suggests Protect, so you can encrypt the signed letter before sending it.