Privacy notice

The firm and this notice

Affinity Search Partners recruits for IT and information systems roles. Employers engage us to place contractors, contract-to-hire staff, permanent hires and technology leaders, and to help decide in what order a team should be built. Our office is at 5123 Virginia Way, Suite A23, Brentwood, TN 37027.

This notice describes our handling of information about people during that work. It covers this website together with the outreach emails, calls and letters we send to people at companies we believe we could help. When we run a search for a client, the information gathered along the way is handled in the same manner.

Why we may write to you

Many team-building conversations begin with a note nobody expected. We write to people whose responsibilities include hiring for, running or staffing a technology function, at the email address they use in their job. Occasionally we follow a note with a call, or with a letter posted to the employer's business premises.

A message goes out only when we have grounds to believe our work could matter to the recipient's role. Should you prefer silence from us, say so in any convenient way and we will stop. The section headed "Telling us to stop" explains how.

Details we keep

What we hold concerns people in their working lives. Depending on what can be found, it may include:

• Work contact details: name, job title, employer, work email, a telephone number for the office, and the address of a professional networking profile.
• Facts about the employer: its line of business, size, location and the technology it runs.
• Public signs of business activity, such as roles the employer has advertised, press coverage and posts the company or its staff have made in public.
• The outcome of a check on whether an email address is likely to accept mail, which we run before sending anything.
• Correspondence between us and the notes we take about it.
• Visits to this website. The site places no cookies on your device and carries no analytics code. Our hosting provider keeps the ordinary technical logs every web server keeps, and the font service that supplies our typeface receives your IP address when a page loads.

We neither look for nor wish to receive sensitive categories of information, such as health, financial account, government identifier or religious details.

Origins of those details

The details above reach us from three directions. From public material: employer websites, boards where roles are advertised, press coverage and the profiles people keep on professional networks. From commercial vendors of business contact and company data, whose records we license. And from the person themselves, whenever they answer a message, fill in the form on our primary website or speak with us.

Our uses

The information helps us judge whether our services could be relevant to a person or an employer, lets us contact people at work about that, and allows us to test an email address before sending so that our mail does not bounce. When a person answers, we use it to reply and, if they wish, to talk through or deliver our recruiting services.

It also keeps our stop list accurate, protects our systems, and lets us comply with the law. Opens of the emails we send are not tracked.

Telling us to stop

No form and no particular wording is needed. Answer any message from us with a request to stop, phrased however you like, or tell whoever calls. We act promptly on such requests and never later than 10 business days after receiving one.

Your name and address are then placed on our stop list, our standing record of people who have asked not to be contacted, and they remain there. Every new batch of contacts is checked against that record, so you will not hear from us again even if your details arrive later from a different vendor.

Sharing

Personal information is never sold by us, nor leased to anyone. We do not pass it to other businesses so they can market to you, and we do not use it for targeted advertising.

Sharing happens in three limited situations:

• With vendors acting on our instructions: the companies running our email and mailboxes, checking addresses, supplying business data, and hosting and storing our records. Each may put the information to no use other than serving us.
• With public authorities when a statute or court order compels it, or when handing something over is the only way to keep a person, their rights or ourselves safe.
• With a purchaser or successor should the firm or its assets be transferred, provided they agree to honor this notice.

Retention periods

Work contact details stay with us while they remain useful for the purposes described here, and records that are stale get removed. Client records, including the searches we run, are kept throughout the engagement and afterwards for as long as our bookkeeping and legal duties demand. Stop list entries stay for the whole period during which we contact businesses, since deleting one would defeat its purpose.

Safeguards

Access is restricted to those whose work requires it, and we apply protections we consider reasonable for a firm of our size and for the type of information involved. No way of storing or transmitting information can be made perfectly secure; we make no claim that ours is.

Your rights

Whoever and wherever you are, you may ask which details we hold about you and their origin, ask for corrections, and have the details erased. The single item we retain after an erasure request is your stop list entry, which exists so that we leave you alone.

State law may add further rights: to know, correction, erasure, and an opt-out from having personal details sold or passed on for advertising. Since we do neither of those things, that opt-out has nothing to bite on, but the remaining rights stand. Exercising any of them will not change how we treat you.

Requests can be made by answering a message from us, through the form on the contact page of our primary site, or by letter to our office. We may verify a request by writing to the email address we first contacted, and our reply arrives within the deadline that the governing statute allows. An agent you have authorized may act for you.

Minors

The site and our outreach are meant for businesses and the people employed by them. We have no wish to hold details of anyone younger than 18 and do not knowingly do so; anything of that kind we discover is deleted.

Location of processing

We are a Tennessee business and everything we do happens on United States soil. The vendors described above handle data at whatever locations their systems run, which may be outside your state or country.

Revisions

Whenever our practices change, this notice changes with them and we revise the effective date printed beneath the title. Whatever appears on this page is the version in force.

Reaching us

Write to the address below, answer any message from us, or go through the form on the contact page of our primary site.