A CV database you can still rely on in three years

Under UK GDPR you need a lawful basis for holding a candidate record and you need to be able to say what it is. Most agencies have a policy that says this and a database that does not record it. Surhires puts it on the record: the basis relied on, the date it was established, the channel through which the candidate came, and what they were told at that point.

That turns a policy claim into something reportable. You can ask how many records in the database have no recorded basis, or which came from a particular source in a particular year, and get an answer rather than an estimate. Cleaning a database is only possible once you can see which parts of it are the problem.

This is a capability statement rather than a compliance declaration. The product supports consent capture, configurable retention, export and erasure. You remain the controller for the candidate data you hold, and whether your processing is lawful depends on decisions you make, not on the software.

A retention policy that lives in a document and not in the system is a policy nobody follows. Retention windows here are configurable per record type and per source, and a record that reaches the end of its window without meaningful activity is flagged for review rather than silently deleted or silently kept.

Review before erasure is deliberate. A candidate placed twice in five years and quiet for eighteen months is not the same as a speculative CV from a job board that nobody ever called. The system surfaces both and lets a human decide, then records the decision.

Erasure, when it happens, is complete: profile, parsed text, uploaded files and message history. Financial records tied to a completed placement are retained where law requires it, and the workflow says so rather than implying that everything disappeared.

Candidate data goes stale faster than any other data an agency holds. A notice period is accurate for a month. A salary expectation is accurate for a year. A phone number is accurate until somebody changes jobs.

Re-engagement cadences let you run a scheduled, opt-out-respecting check-in across a segment of the database and update records from the replies. Reply Handler classifies what comes back and moves the record or raises a task, so an update does not depend on a consultant remembering to type it. Bulk actions from the list view let you tag, pool, message or re-stage hundreds of records at once rather than visiting each one.

The candidate-facing self-service portal, where a candidate confirms availability and uploads a newer CV themselves, is in build for the Wave 1 release rather than shipping today. Until it lands, updates come through the cadence and the recruiter.

Search runs across the structured fields and the parsed CV text at the same time. You can ask for a qualified accountant within an hour of Bristol, available inside six weeks, with practice experience, and get an answer that respects all three constraints instead of everyone whose CV contains the word accountant.

Saved searches become working lists that repopulate as new candidates arrive, which is what turns a database from something you query occasionally into something that feeds the desk every morning. Talent pools hold the lists you work every week; tags handle lighter triage.

Not every seat needs to see everything. Compensation history is permissioned per role. Demographic data captured for equal-opportunity monitoring is stored separately from the hiring record and is not visible to recruiters at all, so it cannot influence the decision it exists to measure.

Field-level permissions also matter on a database that several desks share. A contract desk and an executive search desk in the same firm often should not see each other's notes, and a permission model that only works at the record level cannot express that.

Surhires holds candidate records, relationships and the hiring pipeline. It is not an HRIS, so once a candidate becomes your client's employee, their employment record lives with the employer. It is not a background-check provider or a right-to-work verification service; it captures the documents and the expiry dates, and the check itself is yours to run.

The reason to state that is that a candidate management system with an ambiguous boundary tends to accumulate personal data it has no business holding. Knowing what the database is for is part of keeping it lawfully held.