Privacy & AI transparency

How we handle your information —
and exactly how we use AI

We recruit for AI governance roles, so we hold our own process to the standard our clients are held to. This page is both our privacy policy and our AI transparency statement, published ahead of the automated-decision-making disclosure requirements commencing under the Privacy Act on 10 December 2026.

Privacy policy

Draft for legal review — operative from launch. Last updated August 2026.

Gradient Search collects personal information to provide recruitment and search services: contact details, career history, compensation information, interview records, and the preferences you share with us. We collect it directly from you wherever practicable (APP 3), tell you when and why we collect it (APP 5), and use it only for recruitment purposes and the purposes described here (APP 6).

  • Your profile is never submitted to an employer without your explicit consent — per role, every time.
  • Report interviews are confidential. Compensation data contributed to the Australian AI Salary & Talent Report is published only in aggregate, with cells suppressed where they could identify an individual.
  • Security (APP 11): data is held in access-controlled systems; we maintain a data-breach response plan aligned to the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.
  • Access and correction (APP 12–13): email privacy@gradientsearch.com.au to access, correct or delete your information. We answer within 30 days.
  • Cross-border (APP 8): some processing tools we use are hosted overseas. We list them and the safeguards applied on request, and we do not send candidate data to any tool we haven't assessed against APP 8.

AI transparency statement

We use AI substantially in our own operation. Here is exactly where, and where we don't:

  • Interview support ("second chair"). With your consent, recorded interviews are transcribed and analysed to ensure complete, consistent coverage of a published rubric and to produce the assessment evidence we share with employers. You will always be told before recording starts, and you can decline with no effect on your candidacy.
  • Research and matching. AI systems help us research roles, map markets and surface candidates from our network for a human to review.
  • What AI never does: no AI system decides whether you progress, is used to infer protected attributes, or communicates with you pretending to be a person. Every decision about you is made by a named human, and our AI-assisted steps are audit-logged.
  • Outreach is human-written. If you get a message from us, a person wrote it.

Questions about any of this — including a copy of our current tool list and APP 8 safeguards — go to privacy@gradientsearch.com.au.