Why our candidate profiles have no names on them

Employers are reasonably suspicious of an anonymized roster. It looks like a tactic — withhold the details, force a call, sell.

It is not that, and the mechanism is worth explaining, because once you know how it works the anonymity stops looking like a sales gate and starts looking like the reason the pool has good people in it.

Who is actually on these lists

Almost everyone we represent is currently employed and doing well. That is a direct consequence of our bar: we want a documented commercial record, and people with a documented commercial record are, by definition, working.

So the population is not people who need a job. It is people who would move for the right one. And a person in that position cannot have their name on a public list, because their employer reads the internet. The cost of being discovered is their current role.

If we published names, the only people willing to be listed would be people with nothing to lose. The anonymity is not protecting us. It is the precondition for the pool being worth looking at.

Anonymous by construction, not by redaction

This is the part that matters technically, and it is why we can say it plainly rather than promising it.

A published profile lives in a table that has no column for a name, a current employer, or a unit. Not a hidden field, not a field we remember to leave blank. There is no place in the published record for that information to sit. The website’s build process physically cannot read the confidential record — that lives in a separate store the build has no key for.

The practical consequence: it is not possible for us to accidentally publish somebody’s identity through the ordinary act of editing a profile. The usual way this goes wrong at other firms — a field gets added to a page, somebody widens a query, and a name appears — cannot happen here, because the name is not in the thing being queried.

What you can see before anything is released

Quite a lot, and it is deliberately the part that lets you decide whether a conversation is worth having:

• Service branch, community, and rank band
• Years served and year of separation
• Clearance status, where the candidate agreed to publish it
• Education and certifications
• The commercial track record since service — written concretely, with the scale and the results, and without identifying the employer
• Target roles, functions, industries, locations, and availability

What you cannot see is the name, the current employer, and the contact details.

In practice you can tell from a profile whether this is a person you want to meet. You cannot tell who they are, and that is the only thing being withheld.

What happens when you are serious

When a search is real and you want the full record, we release it — to you, for that candidate, under agreement.

The full record is the identity, the contact details, the photograph, the complete history, the verification record of what we actually checked and who checked it, and any documents the candidate has agreed to share. It is a real handover, not a teaser.

Four things about how that works are worth stating:

It is one employer at a time. A release is to your company, for this search. It is not a general unlock.

It requires the candidate’s recorded consent to be represented. Not implied consent, not a checkbox on a form they filled in two years ago — a recorded agreement to be represented and to have the full record disclosed. Our systems refuse to create a release without it.

It is revocable, and it can expire. A record released for one search does not stay readable two years later because nobody remembered to close it.

It is logged. If a candidate asks us who has seen their details, that is a question with an exact answer, including whether the employer actually opened it.

Some things are never released, to anybody, at any stage. Our own assessment of a candidate — where we think they are weak, how they interview, what they walked away from — is for us. It does not travel with a release and it never will. An employer getting the full record gets the candidate’s record, not our private notes on them.

Why we are telling you the mechanism

Because “we take privacy seriously” is what everybody says, and it means nothing.

The specific claims above are either true or they are not, and most of them are checkable if you ask us to show you. A candidate can ask what is published about them and have it taken down without giving a reason. An employer can ask what is in a release before signing anything.

The five profiles currently on our talent page are labeled worked examples — not real people — because we built the format before we published anybody real into it, and we would rather show you an empty format honestly than a full one dishonestly.

If you are the operator reading this

Submitting an inquiry publishes nothing. There is no public profile created by contacting us, no listing generated, and nothing appears anywhere until you have had a conversation with a person and given explicit written consent to a specific profile you have read.

If you are employed and cautious about that — you should be — the candidate side explains what we do and do not do with what you send us. The short version is that a person reads it, a person calls you, and nothing becomes public without you saying so in writing.