Privacy Policy

gradhire.ai (“gradhire”, “we”) exists to give you a verified, candidate-owned record of what you can do. Privacy is not a bolt-on here: the product only works if you control your record. This policy explains what we collect, why, who can see it, and the controls you have. The short version: your record is yours — private by default, shared only when you choose, exportable, and erasable.

• Account: your email address and sign-in identity (managed by our authentication provider, Clerk) and your date of birth, used once to verify age eligibility.
• Your proof: work you submit, your reasoning during defenses, and the interaction trace of how you worked (what you asked, accepted, overrode). This is the substance of your verified record.
• Scores and credentials: the per-dimension ratings, uncertainty bands, and signed credentials derived from your proof.
• Choices and consents: your visibility settings, discovery opt-in, per-purpose consents, intros you allow or decline, interviews you confirm.
• Community content: posts, connections, and messages, if you use the community (18+ only).
• Employer accounts: organization details, team membership, and billing records (payments are processed by Stripe; we never hold card numbers).
• Demographic data — only if you volunteer it: collected solely for fairness auditing under explicit, separate consent; stored in an isolated system that the scoring pipeline cannot read by construction; reported only in aggregate with small groups suppressed; deletable independently at any time.

• Verifying and scoring your capability — the service itself.
• Representing you, only when you enable it: your persona answers questions from your verified proof alone, and every conversation is logged for you to review.
• Matching, only when you opt into discovery: employers describe a need; your verified record is compared against it. Allowing an intro reveals your proof detail to that organization only.
• Fairness auditing and the published validity ledger (aggregate statistics only).
• Operational email (intros, interview bookings, security notices) — sent via Resend.

Scores on gradhire are produced by an automated measurement system and may be used by employers in hiring decisions, so we treat ourselves as a regulated decision-maker (GDPR Article 22; EU AI Act). Concretely: every score is an evaluative judgment with a disclosed basis and uncertainty band, never an objective fact; every number is drillable to the evidence that licensed it; AI assistance in judging is disclosed; and you have a real right to contest — any score can be appealed to human re-adjudication with the authority to change it, and corrections propagate to every copy of your credential.

• Default: nobody. A new record is private and undiscoverable.
• Your share link shows what you chose to make visible — you control per-dimension visibility and can revoke the credential at any time.
• Employers see your proof detail only after you allow their intro, and only that employer.
• Processors acting under contract for us — each one named in § 7, with what it handles. Submissions sent for evaluation are treated as untrusted data, are never used to train models, and are minimized to what the evaluation needs.
• We do not sell personal data. Ever.

• Export everything we hold about you, from your data page.
• Erase your account: we use cryptographic shredding — the keys protecting your personal data are destroyed, making it unrecoverable, and your credentials are revoked.
• Withdraw any consent as easily as you gave it; withdrawal stops the associated processing going forward.
• Block your current employer from ever discovering you.

We keep personal data only as long as your account is active or as law requires; audit and financial records are retained per statutory periods with personal identifiers minimized. Personal data is encrypted with per-user keys. gradhire requires you to be at least 16; community and messaging require 18+ with verified age. We use only essential cookies (session/authentication) — no advertising or cross-site tracking.

We use a small number of vendors to run the service. They process your data only on our instructions, only for what is listed here, and none of them may use it to train anything or sell it on. We name them rather than say “trusted partners”, because a policy that will not name a recipient is not telling you who has your data.

• Clerk — sign-in and account identity: your email address and session.
• Render — the application and its database, in which everything below is stored. Personal data is encrypted with per-user keys before it lands there.
• Vercel — serves this website. Request metadata only.
• Cloudflare R2 — files you upload: your record photo, anything you attach as evidence, images you post.
• Resend — the emails we send you. Our emails carry no results and no personal detail by design; the substance stays behind your sign-in.
• OpenAI — reads the work you submit and the answers you give while defending it, so it can be comprehended, questioned and graded. This is the one processor that sees your work itself. It is sent for that purpose alone, under an agreement that forbids using it for model training.
• Stripe — employer billing. Candidates never transact, so no candidate payment data exists to share.

Some of these are based outside the UK/EEA; those transfers rely on standard contractual clauses. Your Article 9 demographic data is never sent to any of them — it is isolated at the database level and unreachable from the code that scores or matches you.

We process on the bases of contract (providing the service), consent (discovery, persona, demographics, outcome-following — each separately revocable), and legitimate interest narrowly for security and anti-fraud. For any privacy request or complaint: privacy@gradhire.ai. You may also lodge a complaint with your data-protection authority. We will update this policy as the product evolves and will note material changes here. Version 2 (13 Aug 2026) expanded the processor disclosure into its own § 7: the vendors that judge, authenticate, email and bill were already named, and this adds the ones that host and store — Render, Vercel, Cloudflare R2 — plus the basis for transfers outside the UK/EEA and the fact that Article 9 demographics reach none of them. No processing changed; more of it is now written down.