Last updated 3 November 2026
Hound is recruitment CRM software. Recruitment businesses subscribe to it and use it to keep records about the candidates and clients they work with.
That makes two different relationships, and this policy is about the first one. Hound holds information on behalf of the businesses that subscribe. It does not decide what those businesses collect, why they collect it, or how long they keep it. Each business decides that for itself and answers for it.
So if you are a candidate and want to know what is held about you, or want it corrected or deleted, the people to ask are the recruitment business you have been dealing with. They can see, change and delete your record; they are the ones with the relationship to you. The notice you were shown when you filled in one of their forms names them and tells you how to reach them.
This is a draft policy provided with the software. Each business using Hound should have its own privacy policy reviewed by its own lawyer, and should not rely on this one as a substitute.
For a subscribing business: the business name and trading address, the name, email address and username of each of its users, their password stored only as a one-way hash, and a record of when and from where each of them signed in.
For the people that business recruits: whatever the business chooses to record. Typically that is a name, contact details, work history, the roles they are interested in, notes from conversations, and documents such as CVs and references that the business or the candidate has uploaded.
Emails and text messages sent through the CRM are stored against the record they relate to, so the business has a history of its own correspondence.
Records are stored in Australia, in a Postgres database hosted in Sydney. Uploaded documents, such as CVs, are held in file storage with Vercel, Hound's hosting provider; that storage is not yet in Australia and may be in the United States, and the documents are being moved to storage in Sydney. Information a business chooses to send through Hound's AI features is also processed elsewhere, as described below.
Each business's records are separated at the database layer rather than by convention: every query is filtered to the business that asked it, and a query that cannot establish which business it belongs to is refused rather than answered. One business cannot read another's records.
Hound's own operators can see the list of subscribing businesses, their plan and their user counts. Reaching a business's actual records requires impersonating one of its users, which is recorded in an audit log the operator cannot edit.
Email sent from the CRM goes out either through the sending user's own Microsoft Outlook mailbox, or through Resend, an email delivery service, where Outlook is not connected.
Text messages, where a business has switched them on, are sent through Twilio using that business's own account.
Where a business has connected Outlook, calendar events and emails are read from and written to Microsoft 365 on that user's behalf.
Where a business or its users choose to use Hound's AI features, the record content involved is sent to Anthropic, the company that makes Claude. The Artificial intelligence section below explains how.
Nothing is sold, and nothing is shared with anyone else for advertising or profiling. There is no advertising or analytics tracking in the CRM.
Hound uses Claude, made by Anthropic, in two ways: features that run on Hound's own Anthropic account when a user presses their button, and two optional features that run on a user's own account. None of them runs in the background, and none is used for advertising or profiling.
Features on Hound's account. Format CV, which rebuilds a candidate's CV in the business's own template, sends the whole CV, every page as it was uploaded, to Anthropic to be read. Parse Resume, which reads a CV into a new candidate record, reads it inside Hound by default; where the AI reader is switched on, it too sends the whole CV to Anthropic. A voice note's dictated words are sent to be summarised, and only the summary is kept. A company overview sends the company's name and website.
The in-app assistant. A user can ask Claude questions from inside the CRM. It only works if that user adds an Anthropic API key, which is stored encrypted and is readable only inside that business. When it is used, the record content the user asks about is sent to Anthropic to answer the question.
The Claude connector. A user can connect Hound to their own Claude account, on the web or in the Claude desktop and mobile apps. They sign in to Hound and approve the connection. From then on, when that user asks Claude something, Claude can look up the business's records on the user's behalf and, if the user's role allows it, add notes, prescreens and reminders, create candidate and job records, and move a candidate through the pipeline after the user confirms. Claude sees only what that user could already see in Hound, and never another business's records. It cannot delete records, send emails or texts, or reach invoices and other financial records.
Every request made through the connector is recorded in an activity log the business can review. A business can switch the connector off for any role. A user can disconnect Claude at any time from their Hound profile, and changing a password or ending a session disconnects it automatically.
The Hound Lookup browser extension sends the names and job details shown on the user's screen to Hound only to check for existing records. These lookups are not stored.
Where the information goes. Information sent by any of these features is handled by Anthropic under the terms of the account used: Hound's own Anthropic account for Format CV, Parse Resume, voice notes and company overviews; the API key's account for the assistant; the user's own Claude account for the connector. Anthropic may process it outside Australia, including in the United States. Anthropic's privacy policy is at anthropic.com/legal/privacy.
What subscribing businesses should do. A business that lets its people use these features should decide which Claude accounts they may use, check the settings on those accounts (including whether conversations can be used to improve Anthropic's models), and cover AI tools and overseas processing in its own privacy policy and collection notice.
A subscribing business's records are kept for as long as it holds an account. Deleting a record in the CRM moves it to Recently Deleted, where it can be restored, and it is purged after that window.
Each business decides how long to keep candidate information, and should have a retention rule of its own. Hound provides the deletion and purge tools; it does not decide the schedule.
Passwords are stored as one-way bcrypt hashes and are never recoverable. Repeated failed sign-ins lock an account. One account can hold one live session, so signing in on a new device ends the previous one.
Traffic is encrypted in transit. Uploaded documents are stored privately and are served only to signed-in users of the business that owns them, never from a public link.
No system is perfect. If you believe something has gone wrong with data held in Hound, tell the business whose CRM it is, and tell us.
If you are a candidate or client, raise it first with the recruitment business holding your record. They are the ones who collected it and who can change it.
If your concern is about the software itself, contact Ezra Recruitment, which operates Hound.
If you are not satisfied with the response, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.