Terms of service

What we provide

CheckedWell collects employment references: it sends referees a link, chases them, records their answers, and produces a report. Your plan determines the volume and the features, and the current plans are on the pricing page.

What we do not provide. We do not verify identity documents, run police checks, or check qualifications or registrations. We form no view about whether you should hire anyone. A CheckedWell report is a record of what referees said — not a recommendation, not a certification, and not a substitute for your own judgement.

Your responsibilities

You deal with the candidates and referees. We hold the data; you decide whose it is and what happens to it. You must:

1. Have a lawful basis and the candidate's consent before raising a reference, and tell them a reference is being sought. That is your obligation under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) or the Privacy Act 2020 (NZ), and nothing we do discharges it.
2. Only ask questions you could lawfully ask. If you write your own question sets, do not ask about health, disability, pregnancy, race, ethnicity, religion, political opinion, sexual orientation, gender identity, union membership, criminal record or age. Those questions expose you to liability under the Fair Work Act 2009 and anti-discrimination law, and they are not our questions to defend.
3. Not use a reference to discriminate, and not use CheckedWell for anything other than genuine employment reference checking. Not tenancy screening, not due diligence on a business partner, not checking up on somebody personally.
4. Keep your accounts under control. Every user is a real, identified person with their own login. Owners and directors keep two-factor enrolled. Tell us promptly if an account is compromised.
5. Handle the reports properly. A client report you email to a hospital is out of our hands and in yours.

Break the first, second or third of those and we can suspend the account immediately.

Candidate and referee data

It is your data. You grant us the licence we need to host, process, transmit and back it up in order to run the service, and for nothing else. We do not sell it, we do not share it between agencies, and we do not use it to train artificial intelligence models.

How we handle it is in the privacy policy, which forms part of these terms. Read the section on information that leaves Australia in particular — it names every place data goes and the two that are outside the country.

You can export your data at any time on any plan, and delete your organisation at any time. When you do, it goes.

Users, and what unlimited means

Your plan includes a number of named users and you can add more at the per-user price on the pricing page. A login belongs to one person. Sharing one between consultants is a breach of these terms, and not a pedantic one: the audit trail is the record of who raised a reference and who read it, and a shared login makes that record worthless to you as well as to us.

Fair use. Unlimited references means up to 40 per named user per month, averaged over a quarter. That is two a working day each, which no working recruiter reaches. If you go past it we will contact you first and talk about it — we will not suspend an account or issue a surprise invoice over fair use.

Fees

• Prices are in Australian dollars, stated excluding GST. GST is added where it applies.
• Paying for a year up front costs ten months rather than twelve. Cancel mid-term and we refund the unused whole months.
• During the pilot period, plans are invoiced directly. Payment terms are on the invoice.
• Nothing is charged at the end of a trial unless you choose a plan, and nothing is deleted either.
• We can change prices with 30 days' notice by email. Cancel before it takes effect and you will not be charged the new price.

Availability, honestly

We do not offer a service level agreement, and you should not sign a contract with your own client that assumes one. CheckedWell is a new product. We will tell you about planned maintenance, and we will tell you when something has broken rather than waiting to be asked, but we are not promising a percentage.

When we are ready to commit to uptime we will publish it, and it will be a real number with a real remedy attached.

Security

Our controls are described on the security page and we keep it honest, including about what we have not done. We are not ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certified.

If we suffer a data breach affecting your data we will tell you promptly — whether or not it meets the threshold for notifying a regulator — and tell you what we know, including the parts that are unflattering.

Intellectual property

The software, the question sets we supply, the report templates and the CheckedWell name are ours. Question sets you write yourself are yours. Nothing here transfers ownership of your data to us or of our software to you.

Suspension and termination

You can cancel at any time, effective at the end of your current billing period. There is no exit fee and we do not hold your data hostage.

We can suspend or terminate if you breach your responsibilities above, if an invoice is more than 30 days overdue after we have chased it, or if we are required to by law. Except where a breach makes it unsafe to wait, we give you notice and a chance to fix it first. On termination you have 30 days to export.

Liability

Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies any guarantee, right or remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law (Schedule 2 to the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth)) or, in New Zealand, the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 and the Fair Trading Act 1986, where those laws apply and cannot be excluded. Where our liability under the Australian Consumer Law can be limited, it is limited to resupplying the service or paying the cost of having it resupplied.

Subject to that:

• Neither party is liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of business or loss of anticipated savings.
• Our total liability in any 12-month period is capped at the fees you paid us in that period.
• The cap does not apply to our breach of the privacy policy, to a data breach caused by our failure to take reasonable security steps, or to our fraud or wilful misconduct.

You indemnify us against claims brought by a candidate, a referee or your client arising from your breach of your responsibilities above — using the service without consent, asking unlawful questions, or using a reference to discriminate.

Changes, and the law

We can change these terms with 30 days' notice by email. If you do not accept a change, cancel before it takes effect. We will not change them retrospectively.

Governed by the law of New South Wales, Australia, with both parties submitting to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of its courts. If you are a New Zealand agency and would rather litigate at home, tell us — we would rather agree that up front than argue about it later.

Getting hold of us

support@checkedwell.com. A real person reads it.