A note for candidates — Escobar & Associates

If we reached out to you, you didn’t apply for anything. So you’re owed a straight answer about what we have, where it goes, and how to make it stop. That’s this page.

How we found you

Three ways, and we’ll tell you which one applies to you if you ask.

Sometimes it’s public — a paper, a patent, a talk, something you shipped, your LinkedIn profile. Sometimes someone whose judgment we trust told us to go talk to you.

And sometimes we got your contact details from a paid business-data platform: the kind that compiles professional contact information and sells access to it. That’s ordinary practice in this industry and most firms won’t say so out loud. We will, and we’ll name the specific one if you ask.

Worth knowing if that’s how we reached you: getting your information out of a platform like that is a request you have to make to them, not to us. We can delete you from our records, and we will — but it doesn’t touch their database, and another recruiter with the same subscription will find you next week. Ask us and we’ll tell you which platform it was and where their opt-out page lives. It usually takes a few minutes and a verification email.

What we can promise on our side is that deleted stays deleted. If you ask us to leave you alone, we keep enough of a record to make sure you don’t get contacted again — even if your name comes back to us in a future list.

What we keep

Your contact details, your work history, anything you send us, and notes from our conversations. If we talk about compensation and timing, we write down what you said so we don’t make you repeat it three weeks later.

We also write down our own read on whether you’d do well in a particular role at a particular company. That assessment is ours, it comes from the conversation, and a person makes it. More on that below.

What goes to a client, and when

Nothing goes anywhere until you say yes to that specific company. Not your résumé, not your name, not a description detailed enough to identify you.

Once you say yes, the client sees your résumé and a written case for why you’re worth their time. They don’t see our internal notes or our scoring.

One limit worth being straight about: after your materials are in a client’s hands, they’re in their hands. If you later ask us to delete you, we’ll do it on our side and we’ll ask them to do the same — but their systems are theirs and we can’t reach into them. Our agreement with every client requires them to honor that request, to use your information only for the role you agreed to, and to keep it out of public AI tools. We enforce that on paper. We can’t enforce it on their servers.

Diligence, and discretion

We do look into you. Published work, patents, talks, what you’ve shipped, and sometimes conversations with people who know your work firsthand. A client is paying us to have an informed opinion, and we’d rather build one from more than a single conversation. Pretending otherwise would be the easier thing to write here and it wouldn’t be true.

What we don’t do is expose you. Nobody we speak with is told that you’re looking, that a search exists, or which company is hiring. We don’t contact your employer. We don’t float your name to a client who might float it back. If a conversation can’t happen without revealing you, it doesn’t happen.

Whatever we learn stays with us. Clients get our written case for you — not our notes, not our sources, not our raw research.

And it runs both ways: if you want to know what we’ve heard about you, ask. We’ll tell you.

Where AI fits, and where it doesn’t

We use AI-assisted tools to research companies and technology, prepare interview questions, draft correspondence, and keep our notes organized. It handles the parts of the job that don’t require judgment.

No AI system decides whether you move forward. It doesn’t rank you against other candidates. It doesn’t screen you out. Our assessment method — Beyond-Credentials Vetting™ — requires a person who has actually talked with you, and that person’s name is attached to the result. If we pass on you, a human made the call and can tell you why.

We don’t paste candidate information into free, public AI tools.

How to get out

Say so. “Take me off your list” is enough, and it takes effect when you send it — not at the end of whatever sequence you happen to be in.

You can also ask us to tell you everything we hold on you, correct anything that’s wrong, or delete you entirely. There’s no form and no ticket queue. Write to chris@escobarassociates.com.

The one thing we can’t undo is materials already sent to a client with your approval, for the reason described above. We’ll pass your request along and hold them to their agreement.

Why we bother writing this down

Most search firms don’t. You’re being asked to hand career information to a stranger who gets paid by someone else. The least we can do is say plainly what happens to it.

The full site privacy policy is here.