Your privacy, in plain language

HireKindle is a boutique recruitment agency based in India, connecting startups with candidates across engineering, product, growth, operations, and other functions. This policy applies to hirekindle.in and covers everyone who submits information to us — whether you're a candidate looking for a role, an employer sharing a hiring need, or someone who just sends us a message.

If you're a candidate, we collect the information you submit through our candidate form or account: your full name, email address, phone number, resume/CV, LinkedIn URL, the kind of role you're looking for, and — if you choose to share it — your salary expectations.

If you're an employer, we collect your company name, your name, email address, phone number, and details about the role you're hiring for.

If you sign up or log in using Google or LinkedIn instead of a password, we receive basic profile information from that provider — see Third-party services below.

We don't knowingly collect any sensitive personal data (health information, religious or political beliefs, government ID numbers, and similar) — please don't include this in your resume, message, or role details if you can avoid it.

We collect this information for one reason: to do recruitment. For candidates, that means matching you with relevant job opportunities at the startups we work with. For employers, that means understanding your hiring need well enough to source and screen candidates who actually fit it.

We also use contact details to respond to messages sent through our contact form, and to send account-related emails (like password resets) if you create an account.

If you're a candidate, your profile and resume are shared with an employer client only when we think there's a genuine fit for a role they're hiring for — we don't mass-forward candidate details to every client on our roster.

If you're an employer, your hiring requirement is used internally to source and screen candidates for you. We don't share your company or hiring details with candidates beyond what's needed to describe the role itself.

We do not sell personal data to third parties, and we don't use it for unrelated marketing without your consent. Any use beyond running the recruitment process itself would need your separate agreement.

Your data is stored in our application database, hosted on Railway using PostgreSQL, with access restricted to HireKindle. Resumes are stored in a private Cloudflare R2 bucket and are only ever accessed via short-lived, signed links generated when needed — the bucket itself is not publicly accessible.

Passwords (for accounts that use one) are hashed and never stored in plain text. We take reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect your data, but no method of storage or transmission over the internet is completely secure, and we can't guarantee absolute security.

We rely on a small number of third-party services to run HireKindle, each of which processes a limited slice of your data on our behalf:

• Resend — sends transactional emails (password resets, notifications). Resend processes the recipient email address and the content of the email itself.
• Google and LinkedIn — if you choose to sign in this way instead of creating a password, we receive your name and email address from whichever provider you use. We never receive your Google or LinkedIn password — the sign-in happens directly between you and them.
• Cloudflare R2 — stores resume files that candidates upload, in a private bucket.
• Razorpay— if an employer pays a placement fee through HireKindle, Razorpay processes that payment and receives the employer's name and email to prefill checkout. We don't receive or store card details ourselves — Razorpay handles that directly.

We only share what each of these services needs to do its specific job — none of them are permitted to use your data for their own purposes.

You have the right to ask us what personal data we hold about you, to correct anything that's wrong or out of date, and to ask us to delete it entirely. To do any of these, email hello@hirekindle.in and we'll act on it as quickly as we reasonably can.

If you have an account, you can also update your name, email, and (for candidates) resume and profile details directly from your account's profile page at any time.

We keep your data for as long as it's reasonably needed to provide our recruitment services — for candidates, that generally means for as long as you might still be a relevant fit for roles we're working on; for employers, for as long as we're actively helping with your hiring or you have an ongoing relationship with us.

We'll delete your data on request, or after an extended period of inactivity if we no longer have a reason to keep it.

HireKindle does not use analytics or advertising cookies of any kind — we don't track you across the web, and we don't run tools like Google Analytics.

If you create an account and log in, we set a single strictly-necessary session cookie so you stay signed in. It's required for logged-in features to work at all and isn't used for tracking or advertising.

This policy is intended to align with India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) and general good-practice data protection principles — collecting only what we need, using it only for the purpose we collected it for, and giving you control over it.

We may update this policy as HireKindle changes — for example, if we start using a new service that processes personal data. We'll update the "Last updated" date above when we do. If a change is significant, we'll make a reasonable effort to let account holders know directly.

For any question about this policy or your data, email hello@hirekindle.in.