Partner governance

Build responsibly with Career Unified data

These requirements explain how approved organisations must secure credentials, protect candidate information, operate integrations, and respond when something goes wrong.

This page is an operational summary. The signed partner agreement, data-processing terms, Career Unified privacy policy, and applicable South African law remain controlling.

Approval and access

API access is available only to approved recruiter organisations and reviewed ATS or recruitment integrations. A dashboard login does not automatically provide API access.

  • Each client is linked to one verified recruiter organisation.
  • Scopes must be limited to the minimum capabilities the integration needs.
  • Test and live keys must be kept separate throughout development and deployment.
  • Career Unified may suspend access during an investigation or material breach.

Acceptable use

Partners may use the API only for legitimate recruitment and agreed integration purposes.

  • Do not scrape, resell, enrich, or build unrelated profiles from candidate data.
  • Do not make fully automated hiring decisions from Career Unified data.
  • Do not bypass plan limits, job credits, rate limits, or candidate permissions.
  • Do not expose API keys in browser code, mobile apps, public repositories, or logs.

POPIA and candidate data

Candidate information must be processed only for the vacancy and recruitment purpose for which it was supplied. Partners are responsible for their own POPIA obligations.

  • Restrict access to authorised recruitment personnel.
  • Maintain a lawful purpose, transparency, and a process for data-subject requests.
  • Do not use sensitive or employment-equity information for unlawful discrimination.
  • Use encryption in transit and appropriate encryption at rest.

Credential and webhook security

  • Store API and webhook secrets in a server-side secret manager.
  • Rotate credentials after staff changes, suspected exposure, or according to policy.
  • Verify every webhook signature and reject stale timestamps.
  • Process webhook event IDs idempotently and allow safe retries.
  • Keep production credentials out of test environments.

Retention and deletion

Partners must define retention periods appropriate to their recruitment purpose and delete candidate information when it is no longer required. Career Unified automatically removes sandbox data after 30 days, idempotency records after 7 days, webhook history after 90 days, and API audit records after 365 days.

Reliability, support, and change management

  • Monitor the public status page and integration alert channels.
  • Respect 429 responses and the Retry-After header.
  • Use idempotency keys on create operations and exponential backoff on retries.
  • Test API-version changes in the sandbox before production rollout.
  • Enterprise service levels apply only when stated in a signed agreement.

Security incidents

A partner must notify Career Unified promptly after discovering credential exposure, unauthorised access, data loss, or misuse connected to the integration. Revoke the key, preserve relevant evidence, identify affected data, and cooperate on containment and notification obligations.

Offboarding

When an integration ends, revoke all API keys and webhook endpoints, remove Career Unified data that no longer has a lawful retention purpose, and confirm deletion where the partner agreement requires it.

Production launch checklist

  1. Organisation, purpose, contacts, and data flows have been reviewed.
  2. Partner terms and any required data-processing agreement are signed.
  3. The sandbox integration passes job, application, webhook, and retry tests.
  4. Production scopes and quotas use the least privilege needed.
  5. Secrets are stored securely and rotation ownership is assigned.
  6. Monitoring, incident contacts, retention, and offboarding are documented.