Why we’ll never show your manager your numbers
Surveillance dashboards make recruiters game the metric — and poison the very signal they’re built to capture. We think privacy is a feature, not a compromise. Here is the argument.
Point a measurement at a person’s pay and they will optimise it. Not because they’re dishonest — because they’re rational. This is the oldest law in management, usually attributed to Goodhart: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Most recruiting software ignores it completely.
The pattern is familiar. A tool starts logging activity — calls made, CVs sent, time-to-submit — and pipes it to a manager’s dashboard. Within a fortnight the numbers go up and the work gets worse. People send the CV that bumps the count, not the one that fits. They log the call that looks good. The data that was supposed to reveal the truth now hides it, because everyone knows it’s being watched.
The signal that matters is fragile
Huntchy runs on one thing: outcomes. What got submitted, what the client accepted, where the deal actually closed. That signal is only worth having if it’s honest — and it’s only honest if the recruiter producing it isn’t being scored on it by their boss.
The moment an outcome log doubles as a performance review, it’s contaminated. People will shade the reasons, omit the awkward rejection, round the rate. You’d do the same. So the design choice isn’t a nicety; it’s structural: we will never show your manager your numbers. The intelligence is for the recruiter’s next decision, not for surveillance of their last one.
Privacy as the precondition, not the trade-off
There’s a second reason, and it’s about the candidate. A person’s CV, rate, availability and reasons for leaving are sensitive data. In the EU that’s not a brand value, it’s the law — and the coming AI Act adds a sharper edge for tools that touch hiring: decisions that affect people need to be explainable, and the human stays responsible. So two principles are baked in from the first schema:
- Candidate data is treated as sensitive by default. Minimised, access-controlled, never the product.
- Every conclusion shows its source and what to confirm. No naked number. No black box deciding someone’s shortlist. The tool reasons out loud; the recruiter decides.
You can build recruiting software that watches the recruiter, or software the recruiter is willing to be honest with. You can’t build both. We chose the second, and we think it’s also the only one that compounds.