Prove you can deploy this, and migrate a firm onto it

The implementation curriculum follows the order of a real deployment rather than the order of a product tour. It starts with discovery: how to interview an agency about how its desks actually work, which questions reveal that two clients need different stage machines, and how to spot the custom fields a firm needs before someone invents them badly in week three.

It then covers the data model in depth, because almost every failed deployment traces back to it. Typed custom fields and why they are not free text. Scoping fields per record type. Required-at-stage rules. Field-level permissions on compensation and demographic data, and why demographic data sits outside the hiring record entirely. Stage machines per client and per job type, and the discipline of a fixed disposition list.

The rest covers permissions and desk visibility, imports and duplicate handling, the integrations that are live versus in development, interview scheduling and scorecards, placement and invoicing handover, and the adoption work: training a desk, sequencing a rollout, and what to do about the recruiter who is still using a spreadsheet in week six. It closes on the status board, because a consultant who cannot explain the four states to a client will eventually oversell one.

Migration is where a deployment loses billing weeks, and it is a separate discipline because the failure modes are separate. The curriculum covers extracting from an incumbent system, including what those systems typically will and will not export, and how to establish that before a cut-over date is agreed rather than the night before it.

The core is mapping. Custom fields that exist on one side and not the other. Activity history and whether it can be preserved as a stream or only as a note. Attachments, resume versions and where they go. Notes with authorship and timestamps intact. Placements, invoices and open contract records with their financial fields. Duplicate resolution at scale, where the decision is which record survives and what merges into it, and a wrong answer loses a candidate's history rather than a row.

Then the cut-over itself: staging and reconciliation, how to prove the target holds what the source held, running parallel for a defined period, the freeze window, what happens to a submittal made mid-migration, and the rollback plan you write and hope not to use. The assessment for this certification includes reconciling a deliberately messy dataset, because that is the actual job.

Each certification is taught over structured sessions with exercises between them, then assessed in two parts. The first is a knowledge assessment on the material: the data model, the permission behaviour, the disposition discipline, what each integration state means. It is not a memory test of screen labels, and it is open-book, because a consultant on a client site will also have the documentation open.

The second is practical, and it is the part that matters. Implementer candidates configure a working tenant from a written brief describing a fictional agency with awkward requirements, then explain their choices: why those custom fields, why that stage machine, why that permission model. Migration candidates take a supplied export from an imaginary incumbent, map it, load it, resolve the duplicates and reconcile the result, then account for every record that did not arrive.

Assessment is marked by a person, not a script, and a fail comes with the specific reasons and a resit. Most first-time failures are on permissions and on reconciliation, which is roughly where they should be.

A certification states that a named individual completed the curriculum and passed the assessment on a given date. That is the whole claim. It says nothing about the individual's commercial conduct, their availability, their pricing, the quality of a specific project, or their capability in anything outside the scope of that curriculum.

It is not a guarantee of outcome. Deployments fail for reasons a consultant does not control: a client that will not free up recruiters for training, source data nobody would clean, a stakeholder who changes the requirement in week four, a requirement that turns out to depend on an in-build feature. A certified consultant is more likely to see those coming and say so. That is a real advantage and it is not the same as insurance.

It is also not a professional qualification, an accreditation issued by any standards body, or a licence recognised by anybody other than us. It is a vendor training scheme, we operate it ourselves, and describing it as anything grander would be exactly the sort of claim this site exists to avoid making.

Certification is held by an individual, not by a firm, and it travels with the person when they change employer. A partner firm's tier depends on how many certified individuals it currently employs, which means a firm that loses its only certified consultant loses tier, and that is the correct incentive.

Renewal is annual and is a delta rather than a repeat. The product changes over a year, and what a certified consultant needs is the difference: new capability, changed defaults, status badges that moved, deprecated behaviour, and any migration paths that changed because a source system changed. Renewal is a shorter module and a shorter assessment covering that delta.

A lapsed certification removes the directory listing and the right to describe yourself as certified, and it can be reinstated by completing the current renewal. A lapse is an administrative state, not a judgement, and it is treated differently from revocation.

Certification can be withdrawn, and the grounds are published so they cannot be applied arbitrarily. Misrepresenting what the product does to a client, particularly selling an in-build or planned feature as available. Misrepresenting the certification, for instance describing it as an independent accreditation or claiming a certification not held. Mishandling client data during a migration or a deployment. Using the Surhires name, marks or directory listing outside what the partner agreement permits.

Revocation follows notice and a chance to respond, except where client data is at immediate risk, in which case the listing is suspended first and the conversation happens afterwards. A revoked certification is removed from the directory immediately. We do not publish the reason for an individual revocation, because that is a private matter between us and the individual, but we will confirm to a client whether a named person's certification is currently valid.

Certification is being run with the first partner cohort ahead of general availability, partly to teach and partly because a first cohort always finds the parts of a curriculum that are wrong. The material and the assessments exist; they will change on the basis of what that group finds, which is the point of running it that way.

Fees, session scheduling and the renewal cycle are being finalised alongside the rest of the partner terms and are not published on this page for the same reason the commission rates are not: a number published now and revised at launch is worse than no number. Ask, and you will be told the current position with its status attached. The documentation portions of the curriculum are available to customers deploying the product themselves, because a firm doing its own implementation needs the same knowledge whether or not anyone is assessing it.