Privacy notice

Who we are

TalentSetu is a job portal only for education in India. Schools and other educational institutions use it to hire teachers, principals, coordinators, trainers and school staff, and educators use it to find those jobs and apply.

For the personal data described here, TalentSetu decides why and how it is used (under the DPDP Act, we are the “data fiduciary”). The name and address of the company operating TalentSetu will be added here before public launch.

What we collect

We only collect what the service needs:

• Your account: name, email address, password (stored only as a secure hash, never in readable form) and the type of account.
• Educator profile: headline and summary, mobile number, city, experience, current role and institution, current and expected salary, notice period, the subjects and classes you teach, boards, qualifications, eligibility tests (such as CTET, TET, NET or SET), work history, job preferences and your privacy choices. We keep a history of changes to your profile.
• Resumes: the PDF or Word files you upload.
• Applications: when you apply, a copy of your profile at that moment and the resume you chose, your answers to the school's questions and any note you add; then the application's progress (status, demo classes and interviews, offers and joining checks).
• Messages: conversations between an educator and a school about an application, your support and privacy requests with our replies, and reports you make.
• Institution details (for school accounts): the institution's name, type, description, boards, classes, website, contact details, campuses and addresses, logo, UDISE+ code or board affiliation number, verification documents, its child-safeguarding commitment, and the team members with their roles.
• Your settings: saved jobs, job alerts and notification preferences.
• Security information: the IP address and a description of the browser and device for each signed-in session and in our activity log, sign-in times, and counters that block repeated attempts (stored in a scrambled, hashed form).
• Consent records: what you agreed to, which version of the wording you saw, and when.

We don't sell personal data and we don't use it for advertising.

Why we use it

• To match educators and schools: showing jobs, letting educators apply, letting schools review applicants, schedule demo classes and interviews, make offers and send messages, and sending notifications and job alerts.
• To keep people safe and prevent fraud: verifying institutions (our team checks UDISE+ and affiliation details on the official portals), reviewing jobs that mention fees or deposits, warning educators about messages that mention payments, handling reports, limiting repeated attempts and keeping an activity log.
• To meet legal obligations: keeping consent records, answering privacy requests and grievances, and cooperating with authorities when the law requires it.
• To run the service: keeping you signed in, and counts and statistics (for example, how many applications a job received) that don't single you out.

We rely on the consent you give when you sign up, when you apply to a job and when you choose to be findable by schools, and, where the law allows, on other legitimate uses such as complying with the law and preventing fraud.

Who can see what

• A school you apply to sees your profile and resume only after you apply to it. It receives a copy of your profile as it was when you applied, the resume you chose, your answers and your contact details. Team members of that institution whose role allows it can view the application, and every resume download by a school is recorded. Later edits to your profile don't change what the school received.
• Other schools can't see your profile. When talent search becomes available, verified schools will find you there only if you turn on “Visible to verified schools”. It is off unless you choose it, and you can turn it off at any time.
• The public can see job posts and institution pages. Educator profiles are never public. Institution contact details and verification documents are not shown on public pages.
• An institution's team sees that institution's jobs, applicants, notes and messages according to each member's role.
• Our staff have separate roles for verification, moderation, support and privacy requests, and see only what that work needs: for example an institution's verification documents, reported content, or your account when you ask for help. Staff access to accounts and documents is recorded in an activity (audit) log.
• Service providers: none yet. While TalentSetu is being built it runs entirely on the development computer. Before going online we will list here the hosting, storage, email and SMS providers that will process data on our behalf.
• Authorities, only when the law requires us to share information.

How long we keep it

• While your account is open, we keep your data so the service works for you.
• When you delete your account, it is erased after a 14-day cooling-off period, during which you can cancel. We then erase your profile, resumes and other files, the copies of your applications that schools received, your answers and notes, messages, a school's private notes and interview comments about you, notifications, saved jobs and job alerts. Open applications are withdrawn and the schools are told. The account record itself is anonymised (renamed “Deleted user”, with no email or password) so that schools' counts stay correct without identifying you.
• If you withdraw an application, the school stops considering you but keeps the copy it received as a record, until you delete your account.
• Notifications you have read are deleted after 180 days.
• Signed-in sessions are removed when they expire.
• Consent records and the activity (audit) log are kept as evidence of what was agreed and done, including after an account is deleted. A time limit for the activity log will be set before public launch.
• Safety reports are kept so moderators can act on them and to protect educators and children.

Your rights

Under the DPDP Act you have these rights, and you can use most of them yourself, straight away:

• Access: download a copy of your data from Account → Privacy & data.
• Correction: edit your profile at any time, or ask us to correct something through a privacy request.
• Erasure: delete your account from Privacy & data, or ask us to erase specific data through a privacy request.
• Withdraw consent: withdraw an application, turn talent search off, or delete your account. Withdrawing doesn't undo what was lawfully done before.
• Grievances: make a privacy request (Help → Privacy request). We reply within 30 days. If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Data Protection Board of India.
• Nominate someone to use these rights for you if you die or become unable to: contact us via a privacy request.

The Act also asks you to give accurate information and not to make false or frivolous complaints.

Where your data is stored

While TalentSetu is being developed, all data stays on the development computer: a local database and a private folder for uploaded files. When the platform goes online, we plan to store data in India, in a Mumbai data centre of our hosting and database provider. If any provider will process data outside India, we will say so here before launch.

How we protect it

• Passwords are hashed with argon2id, a modern password-hashing method. Nobody, including our staff, can read them.
• Signed-in sessions use random tokens of which we store only a hashed version. You can see your devices and sign them out, and changing your password signs out every other device.
• Resumes and verification documents are kept in private storage under random names, never at a public web address. Every download is checked against who is asking.
• Access is controlled by role and checked on our server for every request.
• An activity (audit) log records important actions, such as staff viewing an account, and can't be edited afterwards.
• Repeated sign-in attempts are limited, and our logs automatically hide passwords and other secrets.

No system is perfectly secure. If a personal data breach affects you, we will inform you and the Data Protection Board as the law requires.

Cookies

We use one essential cookie to keep you signed in. We don't use advertising, tracking or analytics cookies.

Children

TalentSetu is for adults looking for work in education and for the institutions hiring them. You must be at least 18 to create an account. Schools must not upload or share information about their students.

Grievance Officer and contact

A Grievance Officer will be named here before public launch. Until then, use Help → Privacy request for anything about your personal data, and Help → New support request for everything else.

Changes to this notice

When we change this notice, we update the version and date at the top and ask you to review and accept the new version the next time you use TalentSetu. We keep a record of which version you accepted.