Terms of Service

These terms govern your use of humaninthelooptalent.com and the free material published on it. Using the site means you accept them. If you do not, please stop using the site.

Recruiting engagements are governed by a separate signed agreement, not by this page. Where the two differ on anything to do with a search, the signed agreement wins.

What these terms cover

These terms are between you and Human in the Loop Talent. They cover the website, the writing published on it, and the free tools it links to. They do not cover the terms of any search we run for you, the terms on which we represent a candidate, or the terms of the third-party services we link out to — each of those has its own agreement.

What this site is

Human in the Loop Talent is a technical recruiting and workforce architecture practice serving startups across the United States and Canada. This website publishes our writing on hiring and team design, describes what we do, and links to a free planning tool. Nothing on it is an offer to enter a contract, and nothing on it creates a client relationship. That starts when we both sign something.

The content is guidance, not advice

The frameworks, benchmarks, salary figures and hiring guidance here are general information drawn from our experience. They are not legal, employment, tax, financial or other professional advice, and they are not tailored to your company or your facts.

This matters more than the usual boilerplate suggests. Hiring decisions, compensation decisions and worker classification decisions carry real legal consequences that turn on your jurisdiction and your circumstances, and employment law differs sharply between US states and between the US and Canada. Take qualified advice before acting on anything you read here. Benchmarks and market figures also age — a compensation range that was right when we published it may be wrong by the time you read it.

The planner tool

Our free planner, the Revenue per Employee Planner, runs on ChatGPT and is operated under OpenAI's terms, not ours. Using it means accepting their terms and their privacy policy, and you will need your own ChatGPT account.

It produces AI-generated output, which can be confidently wrong. Treat what it returns as a starting point to check, not a conclusion to act on. Do not enter confidential information, personal information about your employees or candidates, or anything you would not want leaving your control — what you type goes to OpenAI, not to us, and we can neither see it nor delete it.

Fees and engagements

Any fee figures shown on this site — including exclusive search from a 17% placement fee and retained search at 20% — describe our usual pricing. They are an indication, not an offer, and they do not bind either of us. Actual scope, fees, guarantee terms and payment terms are set out in a written agreement for a specific search, signed before work starts.

Candidates

The hiring company pays our fee. Candidates are never charged — not for placement, not for introductions, not for advice. We are not a job board, a CV-writing service or a paid placement service, and we will never ask you for money to be considered for a role.

Nothing on this site is a promise of employment, an offer of employment, or a guarantee that we will find you a role or put you forward for one. How we handle candidate information is set out in our privacy policy.

Our material, and what you may do with it

The text, frameworks, tables, research and design on this site belong to Human in the Loop Talent, except where we credit someone else. Our name and logo are ours.

You may, without asking:

• Read it, and share links to it
• Quote from it with attribution and a link back to the page you took it from
• Use the frameworks in your own hiring, internally

You may not:

• Republish a page or a substantial part of one, in any medium
• Sell it, or put it behind your own paywall
• Present it as your own work, or strip the attribution
• Reproduce our name or logo in a way that implies we endorse you

Acceptable use

• Do not attempt to disrupt, overload, probe or gain unauthorised access to the site or anything behind it.
• Do not scrape the site to build a competing product or to train a model you intend to sell. Reading it, quoting it and citing it — including by an assistant acting for a person — is welcome and is what it is published for.
• Do not misrepresent yourself as affiliated with us, or as speaking for this practice.
• Do not use anything here to break the law, including employment and anti-discrimination law.

We may withdraw access to the site from anyone who does these things.

Links to other sites

We link to services we do not control, including Google, OpenAI, LinkedIn and our scheduling provider. We are not responsible for their content, their availability or their practices, and a link is not an endorsement. Once you follow one, their terms and their privacy policy govern.

No warranty

The site is provided as is and as available. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted or error-free, that everything on it is current or accurate, or that it will meet your needs. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

Limits on liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential losses, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data or lost business opportunity, arising from your use of this site or your reliance on anything published on it. Our total liability arising out of the site is limited to one hundred US dollars.

That limit applies to the website only. It does not limit anything under a signed search agreement, which sets its own terms. Nothing here excludes liability for fraud, for fraudulent misrepresentation, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Indemnity

If your use of this site in breach of these terms causes a third-party claim against us, you agree to cover the reasonable costs of dealing with it. We will tell you promptly about any such claim and will not settle it without talking to you first.

Changes

We may update these terms. The current version is always the one posted here, dated at the top, and continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it. We will not apply a change retrospectively to something that happened before we made it.

Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the United States and of the state in which Human in the Loop Talent is established, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.

Before starting anything formal, email inquiry@humanintheloop.com and set out the problem. Most things are resolved that way, and we would rather fix a complaint than litigate one. Nothing in this section prevents either of us from seeking urgent injunctive relief. If consumer protection law where you live gives you the right to bring a claim locally, this section does not take that away.

General

• Severability. If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest stays in force and the offending part is read down to the narrowest change that makes it work.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
• Entire agreement. For the website, these terms are the whole agreement between us and replace anything said earlier. For a search, the signed agreement is.
• Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these terms. We may, if the practice is reorganised or sold, and the terms will continue to apply.

Contact

Questions about these terms: inquiry@humanintheloop.com.