What happens to your information.

When you apply for a job, the company you applied to decides how your application is handled. They are the controller of your information. Grounded Hire is a tool they use, operated by Advanced Nonlinear Technologies Ltd in London, and we act on their instructions.

To see, correct or delete your information, contact the company you applied to. They can delete your record in Grounded Hire in one step. You can also write to us at [email protected].

If you created an account to make an evidence page about yourself, nobody else is involved: Advanced Nonlinear Technologies Ltd is the controller of that account and its page, and you decide what happens to it.

Grounded Hire keeps your resume file (encrypted), the claims read from it and the report about them, your name, the email address you sign in with, your GitHub username, any links you add, and which version of our terms of service you accepted and when. The text of the resume is read once and discarded, as below.

Your page is private until you publish it. Once published, anyone with the link can see it. It is not listed in search engines. It shows your name, your GitHub username, your claims and the evidence for them. It never shows your email address.

You can take the page down at any time, and it disappears at once. You can also delete everything in one step from your page: the page, the resume, the report, anything you added, and the account itself. A log entry recording that the deletion happened is kept, with no personal information in it.

If you ask to reset your password, our authentication provider emails a link to the address on your account. To stop the reset form being misused, Grounded Hire keeps a one-way hash of the email address you typed and of your IP address. Each is used for an hour and deleted soon after.

For anything else about your information, write to us at [email protected].

A recruiter uploads your resume. Grounded Hire reads the technical claims on it and the links you chose to include. If the resume points to a GitHub profile, Grounded Hire looks at public information on GitHub: which repositories are yours, how their commit history built up, and which languages and dependencies they use. It then shows the recruiter which claims have public work behind them.

Grounded Hire only looks at information that is already public. It does not log in to anything on your behalf and it does not look at private repositories.

• It does not give you a score, a rating or a rank.
• It does not reject anyone. There is no automatic decision of any kind. A person reads the report and decides.
• It does not treat missing evidence as a mark against you. Most engineering work is private, and the report says so wherever nothing public was found.

• Your resume file, stored encrypted, so the recruiter can refer to it.
• The claims read from it, your name, your email address and your GitHub handle if one was found.
• The public GitHub facts that back a claim in the report. Repositories that no claim relies on are not kept.
• Anything you choose to send through an evidence request link: links, a referee’s details, or a short write-up.
• A log of each processing step. The log holds counts, timings and outcomes. It holds no names, emails or resume text.

The text is read once to find claims and is then discarded. To read the claims, the text is sent to Google’s Gemini language model, as below. It is sent only for that purpose. The model has no say in the status of any claim: those are set by fixed, tested rules.

Advanced Nonlinear Technologies Ltd uses these companies to run Grounded Hire. Each handles information only to do the job described here:

• Our hosting provider runs the server that holds Grounded Hire’s database, its files and its sign-in system.
• Google (Gemini) reads the text of a resume to find the claims on it, and helps match those claims to the public evidence. It does this in Google’s data centres, which may be outside the UK. Grounded Hire uses Google’s paid service, under which Google does not use any of this to improve its own products.
• E2B builds and tests a public code repository in an isolated machine, with the network cut off. It does this in the United States. Used only when a hiring team asks for a repository to be tested.
• Mailgun delivers the emails Grounded Hire sends: a one-time code to an address the person typed in moments earlier, and a link to reset a forgotten password. It does this in the European Union. Used only when someone asks Grounded Hire to email them a code or a password reset link.
• Cloudflare (Turnstile) checks that a person, not an automated script, is sending one of Grounded Hire’s forms. To do that it sees your IP address and details of your browser and device, but nothing you type into the form. It does this in Cloudflare’s global network, which may be outside the UK. Used whenever someone signs up, signs in, asks for a password reset, uploads a resume, or answers through a private link. Grounded Hire only learns whether the check passed.
• Kombo connects Grounded Hire to the applicant tracking system a hiring company uses. It does this in the European Union. Used only when a hiring company connects its system through Kombo.
• Merge connects Grounded Hire to the applicant tracking system a hiring company uses. It does this in the United States, or the European Union if the company chooses. Used only when a hiring company connects its system through Merge.

If the company you applied to uses Ashby to track applications and has connected it to Grounded Hire, Grounded Hire reads your application from Ashby and writes a note back. Ashby works for that company, not for us.

Grounded Hire also reads public records, for example from GitHub, package registries such as npm and PyPI, and paper indexes such as OpenAlex and arXiv. Those services do not work for Grounded Hire. Grounded Hire only asks them for public information about a specific identifier, such as a GitHub username or a paper’s DOI.

A recruiter may send you a private link asking whether you would like to add context for a claim. Responding is optional. The link works for 21 days. What you send is attached to your application and shown to the hiring team as your own words. If you name a referee, please ask them first: the hiring team may send them a link with one question about the claim you named them for.

You were named by the candidate, who gave the hiring company your name and address. Grounded Hire runs the evidence checks for that company and holds nothing about you beyond this. The link works for 21 days and asks one question about what the candidate said. Answering is optional, and the candidate is not marked down for a refusal. What you write goes to the hiring team, not to the candidate.

Grounded Hire sends you an email only if you ask it to: if you choose to confirm a work address, a one-time code is sent to the address you type in, and nowhere else. The invitation itself comes from the hiring company or from the candidate, not from us.

You can change or remove your answer through the same link, and you can tell Grounded Hire never to contact you about anyone again. That refusal is kept as a one-way hash of your address with the date, held by Grounded Hire itself rather than by any one company, so that every company using Grounded Hire honours it. It is the one thing we keep after a candidate’s record is deleted, because forgetting it would mean writing to you again.

Grounded Hire also limits how often anyone is asked. No address receives more than 3 questions in 30 days, counting every company that uses Grounded Hire. To apply the limit, Grounded Hire compares a hash of your address with recent questions from other companies. A company that reaches the limit is told only that, never who else asked.

When a recruiter deletes your record, the resume file, the report, the claims, anything you sent and any referee’s details you gave are removed. The processing log keeps an entry that a deletion took place, with no personal information in it.

Your account holds your name, email address and password, managed by our authentication provider. We also keep a record of which version of our terms of service you accepted and when. Reports are visible only to the account that created them. The one exception is a page a candidate makes and publishes about themselves, which they choose to share. You are responsible for having a lawful basis to process the resumes you upload and for telling candidates how you handle their applications. To see, correct or delete your account information, write to us at [email protected].

If you ask to reset your password, our authentication provider emails a link to the address on your account. To stop the reset form being misused, Grounded Hire keeps a one-way hash of the email address you typed and of your IP address. Each is used for an hour and deleted soon after.