Recruiter Terms of Service

These Recruiter Terms of Service ("Recruiter Terms") govern the use of Kanvis by an organisation that hires through it ("Customer," "you," "your"). They are between Kanvis ("Kanvis," "we," "us") and the organisation, and they take effect when a member of your organisation accepts an invitation to a Kanvis workspace or otherwise uses the recruiter side of the Service.

Kanvis screens and ranks job applicants using AI. That places real obligations on both of us, and this document is mostly about which of them are yours. Read Sections 4, 5, 6, and 7 in particular — they are the ones your legal and HR teams will care about.

These Recruiter Terms incorporate the Data Processing Agreement, the Terms of Use, and the Privacy Policy. Where they conflict, these Recruiter Terms control for the recruiter side of the Service, except that the DPA controls on data protection.

1. Definitions

"Applicant" means an individual who applies to one of your roles through the Service.
"Candidate Data" has the meaning given in the DPA.
"Imported CV" means a résumé or CV that you upload through bulk CV import rather than receiving through an application.
"Recommendation" means the Shortlist, Backup, or Reject output the Decision Board produces for an application, together with its headline and confidence label.
"Score" means the deterministic 0–100 match score and its per-requirement breakdown.
"Sourced Candidate" means the record Kanvis creates from an Imported CV.
"User" means a person who holds a seat in your workspace.
"Workspace" means your organisation's tenant on Kanvis.

2. Your Workspace, Seats, and Users

Provisioning. Kanvis provisions your organisation and its first owner. Owners invite further Users by email. Each User holds an OWNER or MEMBER role; owners can invite, revoke, and manage the team.
Seat hygiene is yours. You are responsible for who holds a seat, for revoking access when someone leaves, and for everything done under your Users' accounts. Access is scoped to your organisation — Users cannot see another organisation's jobs, applicants, or notes — but within your organisation, every User with a seat can see the applicant data in it.
One identity, one side. A sign-in identity may be a candidate account or a recruiter seat, never both. If a member of your team already has a Kanvis candidate account under an email address, they need a different address to hold a seat.
Invitations. Invitations are token-based, time-limited, and bound to the invited email address. Do not forward them.
Accuracy of org context. The Service asks you for context about your organisation — description, stage, culture, tech stack, hiring philosophy, benefits — and uses it when writing job descriptions and interview questions. Do not put confidential information you would not want quoted back into a candidate-facing surface into these fields.

3. What the Service Does, and What It Does Not Do

Kanvis is a decision-support tool. It is not the decision-maker.

Kanvis will, on your instruction: interview an applicant conversationally, score them against a rubric derived from your job description and criteria, rank your applicant pool, and produce a Recommendation. Kanvis will not shortlist, reject, hire, or contact anyone on its own. Every action with consequence for an applicant — a stage change, an email, a rejection — is taken by one of your Users pressing a button.

Two structural facts about how it works, because they affect what you can promise your own regulators:

The questions are chosen by deterministic code, not by a language model. A planner selects each probe from your job's requirements, your custom questions, and gaps in the applicant's profile. The language model chooses only the wording.
The score arithmetic is deterministic. Language models read evidence and emit labels and booleans; they never assign the numbers. The same frozen inputs and rubric produce the same score every time, and the inputs are frozen at submission and never re-derived — so a score can be reproduced and explained after the fact.

What it is not. A Score is a structured reading of a job description against a profile. It is not a validated predictor of job performance, not a psychometric assessment, and not a measure of any protected characteristic. Kanvis makes no representation that a Score predicts success in a role, and you must not represent to applicants that it does.

4. Your Obligations as the Employer

These are the obligations that sit with you and cannot be delegated to Kanvis by using our software. You are the decision-maker; the law follows the decision-maker.

A. Meaningful human review — the core duty

You must ensure that every decision affecting an applicant is made by a competent human being who has actually considered the case.

Specifically, you agree:

Not to auto-reject. You must not configure, script, automate, or operate the Service — or any integration with it — so that applicants are advanced or rejected without a human reviewing the individual case. Committing the Decision Board seeds your private pipeline; it does not reject anyone, and you must not treat it as though it does.
That your reviewers are competent and empowered. The person reviewing must have the authority and the standing to disagree with the Recommendation, the training to understand what a Score does and does not mean, and access to the underlying evidence — the transcript, the answers, the breakdown — not just the headline.
To keep review real, not ceremonial. Rubber-stamping a ranked list is not human review. If your process cannot support genuine review at your application volume, reduce the volume, do not reduce the review.
To provide human review on request. Where an applicant asks for human intervention in, an explanation of, or a reconsideration of a decision, you must provide it. Kanvis will give you the information you need (Section 7 of the DPA); it cannot review your decision for you.
To keep records. Retain enough of a record to show who decided what, when, and on what basis, for as long as applicable law requires.

B. Non-discrimination and testing

You are responsible for compliance with all employment and anti-discrimination law applicable to your hiring — including, in the United States, Title VII, the ADA, the ADEA, and their state analogues, and in the EU/UK the equal treatment framework.
You must not use the Service to screen on, or to build criteria that proxy for, a protected characteristic. Private screening criteria and custom questions must be job-related and consistent with business necessity. Do not write criteria referencing age, sex, race, national origin, religion, disability, pregnancy, caring responsibilities, or a postcode or institution standing in for one.
Adverse-impact monitoring is your responsibility. You are the employer; you hold the applicant flow data and the outcome data. Kanvis has neither the demographic data nor the legal standing to audit your selection rates for you. If you need statistical support for an audit, ask us and we will provide what we hold in an exportable form.
Accommodations. A text-based conversational interview will not suit every applicant. You must offer a reasonable accommodation or an alternative selection process to any applicant who requests one, and you must make it plain how to ask. Kanvis supports applying without an interview where a role has no required questions; where it does not, the alternative has to come from you.

C. Jurisdiction-specific screening duties

Where the law of a jurisdiction imposes duties on employers or employment agencies using automated employment decision tools, those duties are yours. Kanvis will provide information and export data to help; it cannot discharge them. Depending on where the role sits and where the applicant is, these can include:

Independent bias audit and publication. Some jurisdictions — New York City is the prominent example — require an employer or employment agency using an automated employment decision tool to obtain an independent bias audit before use, to repeat it periodically, and to publish a summary of the results. Commissioning, paying for, and publishing that audit is your obligation.
Candidate notice. Some jurisdictions require notice to candidates before an automated tool is used, within a defined period, stating the job qualifications and characteristics the tool assesses, and telling candidates how to request an alternative process or accommodation. Kanvis tells applicants they are talking to AI; that is not the same as your statutory notice, and does not substitute for it.
Explanation, correction, and appeal rights. Some jurisdictions give candidates a right to be told that AI contributed to a consequential decision, to an explanation of the principal reasons, to correct inaccurate data, and to appeal to human review. You must be able to honour these, using the information Kanvis provides.
Impact assessments. Some regimes require an employer deploying a high-risk AI system to complete an impact assessment — including, in the EU, a fundamental rights impact assessment where the deployer falls within scope. Kanvis will supply system documentation on request.
Video and biometric interview law. Kanvis's interview is text-only and Kanvis performs no facial analysis, voice analysis, emotion inference, or biometric processing. Do not represent otherwise.

You must tell us which jurisdictions your roles sit in if you need us to support a specific regime, and you must satisfy yourself before you post a role that you can meet the local duties.

D. The EU AI Act — which of us is which

The EU AI Act treats AI systems used for the recruitment or selection of candidates — including systems that filter applications and evaluate candidates — as high-risk (Annex III, point 4). The obligations split between the provider who places the system on the market and the deployer who uses it.

Kanvis is the provider. We are responsible for how the system is built, documented, and tested: risk management, data governance, technical documentation, logging, accuracy and robustness, designing it so a human can meaningfully oversee it, and giving you instructions for use. We will provide the technical documentation and instructions you need in order to meet your own obligations — ask legal@kanvis.me; do not assume you have to reconstruct it yourself.

You are the deployer, and the deployer obligations are yours. In outline, they are: use the system in accordance with our instructions for use; assign human oversight to people who have the competence, training, and authority to exercise it; ensure the input data you control — your job description, your criteria, your rubric — is relevant and sufficiently representative for the purpose; monitor operation and tell us and the authorities if you identify a serious incident or a risk; keep the logs the system generates for the retention period the law requires; inform candidates that they are subject to a high-risk AI system; and, before putting it into use, inform workers' representatives and affected workers where that duty applies to you.

Fundamental rights impact assessment. Certain deployers — notably bodies governed by public law and private entities providing public services — must carry out a fundamental rights impact assessment before first use of an Annex III system. If you are one of them, that assessment is yours to complete. We will supply what we hold about the system's design, intended purpose, and known limitations.

Do not turn yourself into the provider by accident. If you put your own name or trademark on the system, substantially modify it, or change its intended purpose, the AI Act may treat you as the provider and transfer the provider obligations to you. Do not white-label the Service or represent it as your own technology without a written agreement with us.

AI literacy (Section 4(F)) is a duty on both of us.

Timing. The AI Act's obligations phase in, and the phase-in dates for high-risk systems have been subject to legislative amendment. Neither of us should rely on the other's reading of when a given duty starts — take your own advice on timing, and tell us if you need something from us to meet a date.

E. Transparency to applicants

You must not present Kanvis output as a human judgement. Do not tell an applicant a person interviewed them when the interview was conducted by the Service, and do not attribute a Score or a Recommendation to a named individual.

F. AI literacy

You must ensure that Users who operate the Service, and those who act on its output, have a sufficient understanding of what it does, what it does not do, and where it can be wrong. Kanvis provides documentation for this; ask legal@kanvis.me.

5. Bulk CV Import — Warranties You Give Us

Bulk CV import lets you upload CVs of people who have no relationship with Kanvis and never agreed to anything. This is the highest-risk feature on the platform and it comes with conditions.

By uploading an Imported CV you represent and warrant, for each one, that:

You obtained it lawfully and you hold it for a recruitment purpose.
You have a lawful basis to process it and to have it processed by Kanvis on your behalf, for screening against the role you are uploading it to.
You will give the individual the notice their law requires — including, where the GDPR or an equivalent regime applies, notice under Article 14 (or its local equivalent) covering the identity of the controller, the purposes and legal basis, the categories of data, the recipients (including Kanvis), the retention period, their rights, and the source you got their CV from — within the period the law allows, which under the GDPR is normally one month and in any event no later than your first communication with them.
You are not uploading a CV obtained by scraping, from a purchased list, from a data broker, or in breach of another platform's terms.
You will not upload a CV for anything other than assessing that person for the role you upload it to — not for a database of people to keep on file indefinitely, and not to build a talent pool the individual did not ask to be in.
You will delete it when your purpose ends, using the per-item delete or the retention purge, and you will honour a deletion request from the individual promptly.

What Kanvis does on its side. A Sourced Candidate has no account, no login, no public page, and cannot be published. It is visible only to your organisation. If the person later applies to that role themselves, the sourced record is retired and replaced by their real application. If the person contacts Kanvis directly asking for deletion, Kanvis will delete the record and the stored file, and will tell you it did. We will not require them to prove anything beyond identifying the record, and we will not ask them why.

We may suspend bulk CV import on your workspace, without refund, where we have reasonable grounds to believe these warranties have been breached.

6. Candidate Communications

Emails to applicants are drafted by AI, edited by you, and sent by you. Nothing sends automatically. Sending a rejection email is the one action that changes an applicant's visible status to rejected.
You are the sender for the purposes of anti-spam and marketing law. You must not use the Service to send unsolicited commercial email, and you must comply with applicable anti-spam law in the recipient's jurisdiction.
Do not paste rejection reasons that disclose your private screening criteria verbatim, or that state a reason you would not be willing to defend.

7. Private Criteria, Notes, and Confidentiality

Your private screening criteria, recruiter notes, pipeline stages, and activity logs are recruiter-private. They are excluded from every candidate-facing response, and no candidate-facing AI agent receives them verbatim — the interview agent receives only neutralised topic strings derived from them.
This is a technical protection, not a promise of secrecy in law. Notes and criteria about an identifiable person are that person's personal data. A subject access request, a discovery request, or a regulator can reach them. Write notes you would be content to have read back to you by the person they are about.
Kanvis treats your job descriptions, criteria, rubrics, and organisational context as your confidential information and will not disclose them to other customers.

8. Acceptable Use

You and your Users must not:

Use the Service to screen for, or discriminate on, a protected characteristic, or to build criteria that proxy for one.
Configure or automate the Service so that applicants are rejected or advanced without human review (Section 4(A)).
Upload CVs or job content you do not have the right to use, or that you obtained by scraping or purchase (Section 5).
Export, scrape, or bulk-extract candidate data from the Service other than through the export features we provide, or use it outside the recruitment purpose it was given for.
Use candidate data obtained through the Service to build or enrich a separate database, to sell, to train your own models, or for any purpose other than assessing candidates for your roles.
Attempt to prompt-inject or manipulate any Kanvis agent, extract system prompts, or reverse-engineer the scoring logic.
Share seats, resell access, or provide the Service to a third party as a hiring service without our written agreement.
Post fictitious roles, or roles you are not genuinely hiring for.
Represent Kanvis output as a validated assessment of ability, or as a human judgement.
Use the Service where doing so would breach the law applicable to you.

We may suspend or terminate a workspace immediately for a breach of Section 4(A), Section 5, or this Section, and we may notify affected candidates where we consider it necessary to protect them.

9. Fees

Where you are on a paid plan, fees, allowances, and the billing cycle are set in your order form or in the plan you selected. Where you are on a free plan or a design-partner arrangement, no fees are payable, and either party may end the arrangement on notice.
Fees are exclusive of taxes; you are responsible for applicable taxes other than taxes on our income.
We may change pricing on 30 days' notice, effective at your next renewal. Notice of a price change is not a licence to change it retroactively.
Non-payment. We may suspend access after notice and a reasonable cure period. We will not delete your data during a suspension for non-payment; Section 12 governs deletion after termination.

10. Data Protection

The Data Processing Agreement applies and forms part of these Recruiter Terms. In short:

You are the controller for the applicant data you process through the Service for your hiring, and Kanvis is your processor for it.
Kanvis is an independent controller for the candidate-side platform — a candidate's own account, profile, and public page exist independently of you and are not yours to direct.
Kanvis does not sell candidate data, does not use it for advertising, and does not use it to train general-purpose AI models, and its AI sub-processors are contractually barred from doing so.
Sub-processors, security measures, international transfer mechanisms, breach notification, audit rights, and deletion are all set out in the DPA.

11. Intellectual Property and Feedback

Your content is yours — job descriptions, criteria, rubric edits, notes, and organisational context. You grant Kanvis a licence to host and process them to deliver the Service, and to use them in aggregated, de-identified form to measure and improve the Service.
The Service is ours — software, agents, prompts, orchestration, the scoring engine, templates, and interfaces.
Feedback you give us may be used without restriction or compensation.
Publicity. We will not use your name or logo as a customer reference without your prior written consent.

12. Term, Suspension, and Termination

These Recruiter Terms run from the date your workspace is created until terminated.
You may terminate at any time by written notice to legal@kanvis.me. Prepaid fees for the remainder of a term are not refundable except where we terminate without cause or you terminate for our uncured material breach.
We may terminate for uncured material breach on 30 days' notice, immediately for a breach of Sections 4(A), 5, or 8, or on 60 days' notice if we discontinue the Service.
On termination, access ends and Section 8 of the DPA governs deletion or return of candidate data. Export what you need first.
Sections 4 (to the extent it concerns decisions already made), 5, 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, and 16 survive.

13. Warranties and Disclaimers

Each party warrants that it has the authority to enter into these Recruiter Terms.
You warrant that you are a genuine employer or hiring agent, that you will use the Service lawfully, and that you give the warranties in Section 5 for every Imported CV.
Except as expressly stated, the Service is provided "as is." Kanvis disclaims all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.
Kanvis specifically does not warrant that a Score or Recommendation is accurate, predictive of job performance, free from error or bias, or compliant with the law applicable to your hiring; that the Service will produce qualified applicants; or that AI output is free from hallucination.
Kanvis does not provide legal advice. Nothing in these Recruiter Terms, the product, or our documentation is legal advice about your hiring obligations.

14. Indemnification

You will indemnify Kanvis against third-party claims, and against regulatory penalties, arising from: your hiring decisions; your use of the Service in breach of Section 4, 5, 6, or 8; the content you upload; your failure to give applicants required notices; and claims by individuals whose CVs you imported.
Kanvis will indemnify you against third-party claims that the Service, as provided by us and used in accordance with these Recruiter Terms, infringes that party's intellectual property rights. This does not cover claims arising from your content, your configuration, or use in breach of these Recruiter Terms.
The indemnified party must notify the other promptly, give control of the defence, and cooperate reasonably.

15. Limitation of Liability

Neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, punitive, or exemplary damages, or for lost profits, revenue, goodwill, or business opportunity.

Each party's total aggregate liability arising out of or related to these Recruiter Terms shall not exceed the greater of (a) the fees you paid or owed to Kanvis in the twelve months before the claim, or (b) one thousand U.S. dollars ($1,000).

These limits do not apply to: your obligation to pay fees; your indemnity under Section 14(1); either party's breach of confidentiality; or liability that cannot lawfully be limited. Liability under the DPA is subject to these limits except where data protection law provides otherwise, and nothing here limits a data subject's own rights.

16. General

Governing law and forum: the laws of the State of Delaware, United States, without regard to conflict-of-law principles; the state and federal courts sitting in Delaware have exclusive jurisdiction, except that either party may seek injunctive relief anywhere. The Standard Contractual Clauses in the DPA carry their own governing law and forum, which control for those clauses.
Changes: we may update these Recruiter Terms. Material changes take effect 30 days after we notify the owner email addresses on your account, unless a change must take effect sooner to comply with law. If you object to a material change, you may terminate before it takes effect and receive a pro-rata refund of prepaid fees.
Entire agreement: these Recruiter Terms, the DPA, the Terms of Use, the Privacy Policy, and any order form are the entire agreement.
No agency: nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, employment, or agency relationship. Kanvis is not your employment agency and does not act as your agent in making hiring decisions.
Assignment: neither party may assign without the other's consent, except to a successor in a merger, acquisition, or sale of substantially all assets.
Severability, waiver, force majeure: as set out in Section 20 of the Terms of Use.
Notices: to Kanvis at legal@kanvis.me; to you at the owner email addresses on your account. Keep them current.

17. Contact

Commercial and legal: legal@kanvis.me Data protection, DPA requests, sub-processor notices: privacy@kanvis.me