Terms of Service

“DistillHire”, “we” and “us” mean the company operating distillhire.com from Bangalore, India. “You” means whoever is using the service — as a candidate, as a company user, or just as a visitor.

You accept these terms when you submit an application, register a company, sign in, or otherwise use the site. If you don't agree with them, please don't use DistillHire.

Our Privacy Policy forms part of these terms and explains what we do with personal data. Where the two documents cover the same ground, the Privacy Policy governs.

DistillHire assesses software engineers through a structured interview loop run by a human panel, records the outcome as a verified profile, and makes that profile searchable by hiring companies we've approved. That is the whole of what we do.

To be unambiguous about what we are not:

• We are not an employer. We don't employ candidates, pay salaries, or become party to any employment contract you sign with a company you met here.
• We are not a staffing, payroll or contracting agency. We don't place people on our own books or supply contract labour.
• We don't guarantee outcomes. Applying doesn't guarantee you'll be screened, interviewed, scored well, made visible to companies, or introduced to anyone. Registering a company doesn't guarantee approval, search results, or that a candidate will want to talk to you.
• We don't verify employment history, education, certifications, or right-to-work status. What we assess is engineering capability in the rounds we run — nothing more. Background checks remain the hiring company's job.

You must be at least 18 and legally able to enter a contract. If you're registering a company, you confirm you're authorised to accept these terms on its behalf, and “you” then means both you and that company.

• Candidates don't get an account. There is no candidate login, and nothing for you to sign in to. You apply through the form, and everything after that happens over email and calls with our ops team.
• Company users do get an account, and it stays pending until our team approves it. Approval is at our discretion, and we can withdraw it.
• Keep your password to yourself, don't share your login, and tell us at hr@distillhire.com if you think someone else has got into your account. You're responsible for what happens under your account until you do.
• Our ops team can also run searches and request introductions on an approved company's behalf — for example when a company phones in a requirement. Anything ops does for you under these terms counts as done by you.

What you promise us

• Everything you tell us — in the form, on the screening call, in an interview — is true and about you. Your resume describes your own work and is yours to share.
• You sit your own interviews. No stand-ins, no one else on the call, no screen-sharing to a third party, no undisclosed assistance during a round.
• You turn up to rounds you've agreed to, or tell ops in advance if you can't.
• You keep interview questions and materials to yourself. Don't publish, circulate, or record them.

What we promise you

• We'll tell you plainly what we're doing at each stage, and we won't show your profile to any company before you enter the interview loop.
• Approved companies see your profile — your name, email, professional details, skill ratings, and round scores and notes. They don't see your resume file or your phone number. The Privacy Policy sets out the exact fields.
• You can withdraw at any point by emailing hr@distillhire.com. We'll take your profile out of company search straight away.

Something worth knowing up front

You won't be able to see your own round scores or the interviewer's notes. There's no candidate login in the current product, and scores are shown to hiring companies rather than back to you. You're of course entitled to ask us for them under the Privacy Policy — email hr@distillhire.com and we'll send you what we hold.

Rounds are conducted by senior engineers we contract as panel interviewers. They're independent contractors, not our employees, and they don't have accounts on the platform — they relay scores and notes to ops, who record them.

• Your pathway determines your rounds. Everyone on a pathway takes the same rounds; your seniority changes the bar you're graded against, not the round list.
• Rounds run on external video tools such as Zoom or Google Meet. Those are third-party services with their own terms, and we don't control them.
• Scheduling is handled manually by ops over email and calendar. There is no in-platform scheduling, messaging, or video.
• A score is a professional judgement about how a round went. It isn't a certification, a qualification, or a guarantee of how you'll perform in a job — and companies are told to treat it as one input among several.
• We may correct a score or a note if we find a genuine error, and we'll tell you if we do.

These rules are enforced by the platform, not just by policy:

• Ready for visibility. Ops marks your profile ready once it's complete. That decision is ours to make, and it is what puts you into company search.
• 90 days. Your profile stays searchable for 90 days from the day it's marked ready — not from the day you applied. After that it stops appearing to companies.
• One retake per round. You can retake any single round once. The new score replaces the old one for that round.
• 30-day cooldown. A retake is only available 30 days after that round was completed.
• Coming back after expiry. Re-entering the pool requires a full re-interview of every round in your pathway. When ops marks you ready again, a fresh 90-day window starts.

We may change these periods for future candidates as the product develops. If we do, we won't shorten a window that has already started for you.

Approval

New company accounts are reviewed by our team before search access is granted. We may refuse or revoke approval — for instance if we can't verify the company, or if we think the account is being used to harvest candidate data rather than to hire.

How you may use candidate data

When you open a candidate profile you're seeing someone's name, contact email, assessed skills and interview performance. Treat it accordingly. You may use it only to evaluate that person for roles at your own company. You may not:

• Copy, export or scrape profiles in bulk, by hand or by any automated means.
• Add candidate data to a CRM, applicant-tracking system, sourcing tool or database for any purpose beyond the specific role you're evaluating them for.
• Resell, license, syndicate or otherwise pass candidate data to anyone outside your company, including affiliates, clients and recruitment partners.
• Publish or repeat a candidate's scores, notes or profile summary outside the people at your company who need them for the hiring decision.
• Contact a candidate directly using an email address you got from a profile, instead of going through our introduction process.
• Use the data to make a decision on any basis prohibited by law.

Scores, interviewer notes and profile summaries are confidential to you. Keep them within your hiring team, and don't share them with the candidate — the interviewer's notes are written for assessment, not as feedback for the candidate to read.

Your own hiring process

Our assessment doesn't replace yours. You remain responsible for your own evaluation, offers, background and reference checks, right-to-work verification, employment contracts, and compliance with employment and anti-discrimination law. You're also responsible for handling candidate personal data lawfully once it's in your hands — at that point you're the one answerable for it, not us.

Companies can't message candidates through DistillHire. When you request an introduction, it goes to our ops team, who ask the candidate and — if they're interested — connect the two of you by email.

• A candidate can decline an introduction, and doesn't have to give a reason.
• Requesting an introduction doesn't reserve a candidate or give you any exclusivity.
• Once we've introduced you, our part is done. Everything after that — interviews, offers, negotiation, contracts, disputes — is between you and the candidate, and we're not a party to it.
• Our part ending doesn't cancel anything your company owes us. Fees under your commercial agreement still apply, including any triggered by a hire that follows an introduction — see Section 9.
• Don't try to route around the introduction process, and don't ask ops to pass on anything you wouldn't put in a first email to a stranger.

We'd like to hear how introductions turn out so we can tell whether the service works, but you're not obliged to tell us.

Candidates pay nothing

DistillHire is free for candidates. We don't charge you to apply, to be screened, to sit any round, to retake a round, or to be made visible to companies. We don't take a cut of your salary, and we won't ask you for payment details. If anyone asks you to pay to be interviewed or placed through DistillHire, it isn't us — tell us at hr@distillhire.com.

Companies pay under a separate agreement

Use of DistillHire by a hiring company is not free. Fees are set out in the separate written commercial agreement between us and your company — there is no standard public price list, and terms are agreed company by company.

• That agreement governs everything commercial: what you pay, what triggers a charge, payment and invoicing terms, currency and taxes, term and renewal, and what happens on non-payment.
• Your company owes those fees whether the work was done through the platform or by our ops team on your behalf — a search we ran for you, or an introduction we made on your instruction, counts the same as one you did yourself.
• If your company doesn't have a current signed agreement with us, we may withhold or revoke search access until one is in place.
• Where the commercial agreement and these terms conflict on any commercial matter — fees, payment, term, liability, or anything else it expressly covers — the commercial agreement prevails for your company. These terms continue to govern everything it doesn't address.

Nothing on this website is an offer of pricing or a quote. If you're unsure what your company has agreed, or you want to discuss terms, email hr@distillhire.com.

Whoever you are, please don't:

• Scrape the site, or access it with bots, crawlers or automated scripts.
• Work around our access controls, rate limits, or the approval gate on company accounts — or try to reach data you haven't been given access to.
• Probe, load-test or attack the service, or upload anything malicious.
• Impersonate anyone, or misrepresent who you are or who you work for.
• Upload anything unlawful, infringing, or that you don't have the right to share.
• Reverse-engineer the platform, or copy how it works to build a competing service.
• Use the service for anything illegal, or in a way that puts us in breach of the law.

We rate-limit our public forms and monitor for abuse. If you hit a limit legitimately, email hr@distillhire.com and we'll sort it out.

Your resume and everything else you send us stays yours. We don't claim ownership of it.

You give us permission to store, process and display that material for the purposes described in the Privacy Policy — running your screening and interviews, building your profile, and showing the profile to approved companies during your visibility window. That permission lasts as long as we hold your data, and ends when we delete it.

You confirm that what you send is yours to send, and doesn't breach anyone else's rights or any confidentiality obligation you're under — please don't put a current employer's confidential material in your resume or discuss it in a round.

The platform itself — the site, our name and branding, the design, the pathway and round structure, the scoring framework, and everything we write including profile summaries — belongs to us. These terms don't transfer any of it to you. You get permission to use the service as intended, and nothing beyond that.

You can stop using DistillHire whenever you like. Candidates: email hr@distillhire.com and we'll withdraw your profile. Company users: email us to close your account.

We may suspend or remove an account or a candidate profile if someone breaks these terms — in particular for dishonesty in an interview, misuse of candidate data, or abuse of the platform. Where it's reasonable to do so we'll tell you why first and give you a chance to put it right, but we may act immediately if the breach is serious or if a candidate's data is at risk.

When access ends, a candidate profile stops appearing in company search immediately. What happens to the underlying data — and how long we keep it — is set out in the Privacy Policy. Sections on acceptable use, our intellectual property, disclaimers, liability, indemnity and governing law survive the end of this agreement.

We provide DistillHire as it is. We work hard to make it accurate and available, but we can't promise it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that it will produce any particular result for you.

• To companies: we don't warrant that a candidate's profile is complete or accurate, that their score predicts job performance, that they're still available, or that they'll respond to an introduction. Your hiring decision is yours.
• To candidates: we don't warrant that you'll be found in search, contacted, introduced, interviewed by a company, or hired.
• Interviews depend on third-party video tools, and interviewer availability depends on people. Rounds get rescheduled.
• To the extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. Nothing here excludes liability that can't lawfully be excluded.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we're not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profits, lost opportunity, lost data, reputational harm, or the cost of a bad hire — including losses arising from a hiring decision you made, a job you took or turned down, or an introduction that came to nothing.

Our total liability to you for everything arising out of these terms or your use of the service is capped at the greater of ₹10,000 or what you've paid us in the twelve months before the claim. For candidates, who pay nothing, that means ₹10,000. For a hiring company, any liability cap in its commercial agreement with us applies instead of this one.

This section doesn't limit liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else that Indian law says can't be limited.

If you're a hiring company, you agree to cover us against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from your use of candidate data in breach of these terms, from your own hiring decisions and employment practices, or from your handling of personal data once we've passed it to you.

If you're a candidate, the same applies to anything you send us that isn't yours to send, or that you've misrepresented.

The product is early and these terms will change with it. We'll update the effective date at the top whenever they do. For material changes we'll email registered company users and candidates with an active visibility window before the change takes effect, rather than relying on you to notice. Carrying on using DistillHire after that means you accept the new version.

We may also change, suspend or discontinue parts of the service. If we retire something you depend on, we'll give you as much notice as we reasonably can.

These terms are governed by the laws of India. The courts at Bengaluru, Karnataka have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

Before going to court, please raise the issue with our Grievance Officer below — most things are quicker to fix by email. If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Our not enforcing something straight away doesn't mean we've given up the right to.

For anything to do with these terms, or to complain about the service or about something someone has posted or done on it, contact our Grievance Officer:

In line with India's Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, we acknowledge complaints within 24 hours and aim to resolve them within 15 days.