Privacy policy
Here is what Affinity Search Partners knows about the people it writes to and the people who read this site, how that knowledge is gathered, what it is for, and the quickest way to be left alone. Every topic below is written to stand by itself, so skip to whichever one brought you here.
Who we are and what this covers
Affinity Search Partners is a recruiting firm for IT and information systems roles. We place contractors, people on contract-to-hire terms, permanent staff and technology leaders with employers in Middle Tennessee and around the country. Our office is at 5123 Virginia Way, Suite A23, Brentwood, TN 37027.
Two things fall under this policy: the website you are reading, and the business email we send from this domain and from our other domains. It describes how we treat the professional details of the people we write to at companies, of the candidates we speak with, and of anyone who visits these pages.
Why you may have heard from us
The people we write to have jobs connected to ours: managers and leaders who hire technical staff, and professionals whose skills match a search we are running. Those notes go to a work mailbox. Now and then we follow up with a phone call, or with a letter sent to the company's business address.
We only get in touch when we have a reason to think the work is relevant to your position. If it is not, one reply is enough and the messages end.
The information we hold
For each person we contact we keep business contact details where they exist: a name, a job title, an employer, a work email, a business phone number, and the address of a public professional profile. We keep facts about the employer too, such as industry, headcount band and location.
We note public business activity as well, meaning job openings the company has posted, news about it and public professional posts. We record the outcome of checks that tell us whether a mailbox accepts mail, and we keep the correspondence and the notes from any conversation with you.
Nothing we hold is what we would call sensitive: no health details, no financial accounts, no government identifiers or anything of that kind.
Visiting this site
There are no cookies on these pages and no analytics script. The company that hosts the site keeps ordinary technical logs, meaning the network address a request came from and the page it asked for, as any web server does.
The typeface is delivered by an outside font provider, and delivering those files means the provider sees the IP address of the device you are using. Beyond that, we record nothing about your visit.
Where the information comes from
The bulk of it is drawn from the public record: employer websites, posted job openings, press coverage and professional networking profiles. Alongside that we buy business contact data from commercial providers whose trade is company and professional information.
The rest we learn from you directly, through a reply to one of our messages, a form submitted on our main site, or a conversation. Those exchanges are the most useful source we have, and we keep notes of them.
How the information is used
Business details help us judge whether a company or a person is a sensible fit for the work we do. They let us contact people at work about that work, and they let us confirm that a mailbox accepts mail before anything is sent to it.
When someone writes back, their details are used to answer them and, if they wish, to discuss or provide our services. Beyond that, the information supports our stop list, described below, protects our systems, and lets us meet the obligations the law places on us.
Whether an email has been opened is not something we track.
How to make us stop
Answer any message from us, in whatever words you choose, and say you would rather not hear from us. If the contact was a phone call, telling the caller is enough. No reason is needed.
We act on that promptly, and never later than ten business days after you ask. Your name and address then go onto a do-not-contact list, which we call the stop list, and every piece of outreach is checked against it first. That way you are not contacted again even if your details come to us later from a different source. The stop-list entry is the one record we keep on purpose.
Who else sees it
The information we hold is never sold or rented, nor is it passed to other companies so that they can market to you or aim advertising at you.
We do rely on service providers who work for us: the firms that run our email and mailboxes, the firms that verify addresses, the business-data providers, and the hosting and storage providers. Each may handle the information only for the job it does for us. We may also disclose information when the law demands it, to protect someone's rights or safety, or to whoever buys or succeeds to the business, who would take on this policy with it.
Retention
Business contact details stay with us while they remain useful for the purposes above, and we clear out stale entries, such as people who have moved employer or roles that no longer exist.
Records of a client engagement stay for the life of the work and afterwards for whatever period accounting and legal rules require. Stop-list entries stay for the whole time we do business outreach, since that is what makes them effective.
How we protect it
Only people whose work requires it can get at the information, and we apply reasonable administrative and technical safeguards suited to a small firm that handles business contact data.
No way of storing or sending information is beyond risk, so we cannot guarantee that it will never be reached without authorization. This page describes what we do; it makes no claims about particular technologies.
Your choices and rights
You may request a copy of whatever we hold about you, together with where it came from. You may have it corrected. You may have it deleted, with a single exception: your stop-list entry stays, because removing it would allow you to be contacted again.
Some states grant further rights by statute, among them rights of access, correction, deletion and opting out of the sale or sharing of personal information. Since we neither sell nor share personal information for those purposes, there is nothing to opt out of, and nobody is treated differently for exercising a right. A person you have authorized to act for you may put in a request on your behalf.
Requests can come by replying to a message from us, through the form on our main site at affinitysearchpartners.com/contact, or by letter to the office address below. Before acting we may confirm that a request really comes from the mailbox we wrote to, and we answer inside the period the relevant law sets.
Not for children
This site and our emails are aimed at businesses and the professionals who work in them. We never knowingly gather details about anyone younger than eighteen.
If you believe we hold such details, tell us and they will be removed.
Where we operate
Our business is run from Tennessee and serves the United States, and our outreach is aimed at businesses and professionals in the United States.
Some of the providers we depend on process information wherever their own systems happen to sit, which may be another state or another country.
When this policy changes
If the way we handle information changes, this page is revised and the effective date printed above the title changes with it. That date tells you which version you are reading.
Using the site, or continuing to correspond with us, after a revision means you accept the revised policy.
Reaching us
Post reaches us at Affinity Search Partners, 5123 Virginia Way, Suite A23, Brentwood, TN 37027.
Otherwise, answer one of our messages, or go through the form at affinitysearchpartners.com/contact. Questions about this policy and requests about your own information take the same route.