Terms of service

CouchHire is invite-only. An account exists because an invitation was issued and redeemed; there is no open sign-up, and no way to create one without an invitation.

The marketplace is for senior technical professionals in roles paying $150,000 and above, and for the companies and recruiters hiring them. Interview panelists are selected by the platform, not admitted on application alone.

An invitation is issued to a person, not to a seat. Use your own account, and do not pass your invitation or your sign-in to somebody else.

CouchHire is an anonymous, priced marketplace. Candidates list themselves under a handle with a price they set, employers search and make offers against that price, and a candidate's identity is disclosed only when both sides accept the same offer.

We are not your employer, we are not your agent, and we are not a party to any employment either side agrees through the platform. What we do is vet, price and introduce. The terms of the job itself are between you and the other side.

Nothing here is a guarantee of a match, an offer or a hire. We do not promise that a listing will attract interest or that a search will find anyone.

A candidate sets two numbers. The Hire-Now price is the take-it-or-leave-it figure -- an employer who pays it moves straight to a match. The reserve is the lowest number that candidate will consider at all.

A candidate who is open to bids can be offered anything down toward that reserve. A candidate who is not is Hire-Now only, and no bid below the price reaches them.

A bid below the reserve is flagged as below reserve and carries no accept action. It can be countered or declined; it cannot be accepted as it stands. Accepting below your own stated floor would make the reserve mean nothing, so the product does not offer it.

A candidate can leave the market at any time. Turning the listing off removes it from employer search immediately.

A match exists only when both sides have accepted the same offer at the same amount. That single agreement is what unlocks identity.

On a match, the candidate's name, email and current employer become readable to the matched employer and to nobody else. Every reveal is recorded, and no reveal can be taken back. Accepting an offer is accepting that.

What you learn at a reveal is for that hiring conversation. Do not pass a revealed identity on, and do not use it to approach the person for anything else.

A panel interview is booked and paid for by the candidate. CouchHire pays the interviewer $250 for a session of about 45 minutes; what you pay above that covers the private room, the scheduling and the refund guarantee.

You can cancel up to 24 hours before the session and get the whole amount back. Inside that window the cancellation is refused rather than charged for -- the session stands, and an operator is the only one who can move or cancel it after that.

If the interviewer does not appear, you get the whole amount back and the panelist is paid nothing. That refund is fired by an operator rather than by a timer, because a no-show is a human judgement. The session stays on the record as a no-show; it is not rewritten as a cancellation to make the refund fit.

Your interviewer's feedback belongs to your listing, and employers see it only if you turn sharing on. Either way it is attributed to a VP-level peer in a field, never to a name.

Panelists interview neutrally and are paid by us for that work. Do not take a payment from either side outside the platform, and do not trade on what you learn in a session.

Companies and the recruiters working with them buy access by subscription, billed through Stripe. A plan runs for the period it names and renews unless it is cancelled.

That subscription belongs to the company rather than to the person who signed up for it. When the last open account in a company closes, it is cancelled, so a company nobody can sign in to stops being charged. While a colleague's account is still open, it is untouched.

Candidates are not charged to be on the marketplace during the pilot. Listing and the monthly market report cost nothing, and nothing is locked if a subscription lapses while the pilot runs.

We keep the billing record -- what was charged, to whom, and for which period -- the way an invoice is kept, and closing an account does not remove it.

The whole product rests on one rule: a candidate stays anonymous until they choose otherwise. Do not try to work out who a candidate is before they reveal themselves -- not by combining signals across listings, not by searching elsewhere on what a listing tells you, and not by asking an operator or a panelist to tell you.

Do not scrape, bulk-export or resell listings, prices, match scores or market reports. What you can see, you can see for your own hiring or your own career.

Say true things about yourself. Your skills, your level, your current employer, your resume and your compensation are the basis on which the other side decides.

Use the platform for what it is for. Do not route around a match to reach a candidate directly, and do not use CouchHire to send anyone anything unrelated to hiring.

One last practical thing. Free text you type into a support message or a vetting field can be read by a CouchHire operator through an audited door. Do not put anything in one that you would not want read.

We can suspend or remove an account that breaches these terms, and we will say why. An attempt to de-anonymize a candidate, a resold export, or a serious misrepresentation is grounds for removal without notice.

We can also remove a panelist from the panel. A panelist who is deactivated keeps the record of the interviews they ran and is paid anything still owed to them.

You can close your account yourself, from the privacy pane in your settings. Closing is one way and nothing about it can be undone.

It is refused in two situations, so that nothing is left hanging: while we still owe you a payout for a completed interview, and while you have an interview on the calendar. Settle either one and closing is available again.

Coming back is not self-service. A new account needs a fresh invitation, and the sign-in behind a closed account cannot be used for one until an operator removes it.

Closing does not erase everything, and the privacy policy says record by record what it does. In short: your identity and your vetting record are deleted, records that name a handle rather than a person stay, and audit and billing records are kept on purpose.

Every version of these terms and of the privacy policy carries a version number and the date it was published, and we record which version you accepted and when.

When we publish a new version we ask you to accept it before you carry on using CouchHire. If you decline, CouchHire pauses for you. Nothing is deleted, and you can still download your data and close your account.