Privacy|

The controller for hero.direct is Hero Interim Professionals B.V., Geert Scholtenslaan 9-H, 1687 CL Wognum, registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce under number 37131275.

Do you have a question about your privacy or would you like to exercise one of your rights? Email privacy@hero.eu. We will respond within 30 days.

To manage your account and keep the website running properly, we use your name, email address and preferences. You create an account with LinkedIn: LinkedIn then gives us your name, your email address, the language of your LinkedIn account and, if you have one, your profile photo. Your email address is required; without an email address you cannot create an account. You can view assignments and use the chat without an account, but you cannot post an assignment or register as an interim professional.

You have one account for hero.eu, hero.works and hero.direct: the same login gives you access to all three websites. The three websites only share that login, so your email address and what we receive from LinkedIn when you log in. Your profile, your chats and your files on hero.direct are kept separately from those on hero.eu and hero.works. If you register as an interim professional, that registration goes into the same recruitment system from every website. Want to delete your account? Request this via My account. A colleague at Hero will handle your request; until then, you can log in as usual.

On hero.direct, you can show as an interim professional that you are available for an assignment. If you set your profile to Available yourself, Hero may show it to all visitors of hero.direct: your name, your title, your location and your skills.

When a client posts an assignment, that client immediately sees the profiles that match the assignment. Your profile may be among them, also when it is set to Busy. The client then sees your name, your title, your location, your skills, whether you are available or busy, and a match score. Only the logged-in client who posted the assignment sees this; it is not on a public page and search engines cannot find it.

Your email address and phone number are not visible. If a client wants to get in touch with you, this goes through Hero. You decide yourself whether your profile is set to Available, and you can change this at any time.

To post an assignment, you log in. You upload a document with the assignment and can add a short note. Using AI, we read the document and fill in the assignment for you, such as the title, the description, the location, the rate and the required skills, and the name of your organisation if it appears in the document. We do not keep the file itself: we only keep the text we extract from it and the name of the file, with the assignment.

A posted assignment is meant for the public marketplace: Hero may show it to every visitor of hero.direct. So do not include any personal data in your document or note that should not become public, such as names or phone numbers. After posting, we show you the profiles that match your assignment. If you want to get in touch with one of these professionals, this goes through Hero, using the contact form on hero.works.

For your interim profile, we use the details you fill in to match you with suitable interim assignments. Think of your contact details, availability, hourly rate, the roles you are open to and, where applicable, your CV. You can change these details at any time via My account. No longer want to be in our talent pool? Then switch off the registration via My account and we will withdraw your registration in our recruitment system. If nothing has been done with your registration yet (no contact, no proposal to a client and no shortlist), we mark your data there as deleted straight away. Otherwise it stays in the recruitment system, but no longer in the talent pool.

When you upload your LinkedIn profile, we use the details you share to give you a more personal experience and match you with suitable assignments. You can delete this data at any time via My account.

When you use the chat, we process your chat messages and the files you upload in the chat. If you give consent for this, we also use data from your profile, CV or LinkedIn profile to help you in a more personal way.

To answer your question we use AI from Anthropic. The data you share with us may be processed outside the European Economic Area for this purpose. The safeguard that applies is listed under Anthropic in ‘With whom does Hero share my personal data?’. Your data is not used to train AI models.

A chat message becomes a question to Hero as soon as you have it forwarded to a colleague at Hero yourself: with the button in the chat, by leaving your email address or phone number in the conversation, or by saying yes when the chat asks whether it may forward your question. We use your name, email address and your question or report to deliver it to the right Hero team, as well as your phone number and screenshots if you include them. We usually respond by email, but we may also call you if we have your phone number.

Your question reaches the team by email; screenshots are only kept in that email. We also keep a copy of your question, separate from the conversation, so that we can handle your request properly and retrieve it if needed. How long is set out under ‘How long does Hero retain my data?’; the conversation itself falls under the retention period for chat messages.

Hero uses necessary cookies to keep the website running properly. With your permission, we also use analytics cookies and similar techniques: with them we measure how the website is used and see which organisations visit it. To find out how to change your choice, see ‘How do I update my cookie preferences?’.

The cookies we place fall into three categories:

If you consent to analytics cookies, we measure how the website is used: which pages you visit and what you click on. We do this with our own measurement and with Google Analytics. Our own measurement uses a random code instead of your name; if you are logged in, however, we link it to your account. Google Analytics receives the same random code, the pages you visit, your clicks and, through your browser, your IP address; Google’s advertising features are switched off. We use this information to improve the website, the marketplace and the user experience. We delete our own measurement automatically after 12 months; Google Analytics keeps this data for up to 14 months.

In addition, we keep an anonymous count of how many questions and reports we receive in total. For this we use no cookies and record nothing about who you are; it is purely about numbers that help us improve our service. If you are logged in, we also record with your account when you choose between Hero Basic and Hero AI and when you change your language; we also delete this automatically after 12 months.

With your consent to analytics cookies, Hero can see which organisation visits our website. This gives us a better understanding of the interest of business visitors. This is done by an app of Hero’s own, which runs at Railway in the Netherlands. Your browser sends that app the page you visit and the page you came from, and the app looks up the organisation behind your IP address at ip-api.com, a service run by Artia International S.R.L. in Romania. Your IP address is only processed briefly for this: our app does not store it, and ip-api.com says it discards it as soon as the request has been answered.

We keep the name and domain of the organisation, the city, region and country that belong to your IP address, the page, the page you came from, the time and a code that we create each day from your IP address and your browser. This data is not anonymous: the code makes it possible to link your visits on a single day, and for a sole proprietorship the name of the organisation points to a person. We delete it automatically after 12 months. If you start a conversation in the chat with this consent, we also keep the organisation we recognise this way with that conversation, for as long as the conversation exists.

We only process your data when there is a legal basis for it:

• Performance of a contract or steps at your request: managing your account, showing your profile when you set it to Available, posting your assignment and processing your interim registration.
• Consent: analytics cookies, including Google Analytics and the recognition of business visitors, uploading your LinkedIn profile and using your profile data to personalise the chat. You can withdraw your consent at any time; what we did with your consent before then remains lawful.
• Legitimate interest: answering your questions, securing and improving our website, counting questions and reports anonymously, and recording your choice between Hero Basic and Hero AI and your language.
• Legal obligation: when laws or regulations require us to retain or share data.

Below you can see how long we keep each type of data. Where a period is marked ‘intended’, our software does not yet delete the data automatically: Hero aims to keep to that period and is building this into the software.

Hero never sells your personal data to third parties. To carry out our services, we engage carefully selected parties:

• (prospective) clients: when you register as an interim professional, we may share your details with clients that have a matching assignment;
• our recruitment system, in which we process registrations; it is hosted by Supabase on servers in Germany;
• Supabase (servers in Germany), for our database and file storage, and Railway (United States), the platform the website runs on;
• Twilio SendGrid (United States), our email service for confirmation and notification emails. Twilio is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework;
• Anthropic (United States), the provider of our AI: your chat messages, the files you upload in the chat, the documents you use to post an assignment and, when you share them, your CV and your LinkedIn profile are processed to answer your questions, fill in assignments and take over details from your CV or LinkedIn profile. Anthropic does not train AI models on this data. The European Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) apply as a safeguard;
• Google (United States), for Google Analytics: only with your consent to analytics cookies does Google receive a random visitor code, the pages you visit, your clicks and, through your browser, your IP address. Google is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework;
• ip-api.com, a service run by Artia International S.R.L. (Romania), for recognising business visitors: only with your consent to analytics cookies does our app ask this service which organisation is behind your IP address; ip-api.com only receives your IP address for this;
• LinkedIn (Ireland), if you choose to sign in with LinkedIn.

Some of these parties process data outside the European Economic Area. For Twilio SendGrid and Google, the EU-US Data Privacy Framework applies to that transfer, and for Anthropic the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses apply. You can request a copy of the safeguards used via privacy@hero.eu.

What you make public yourself, such as your profile set to Available or an assignment you post, Hero may show to every visitor of hero.direct.

No. Searching for profiles that match an assignment is, however, profiling: a function in our database compares the assignment with the profiles, among other things on the skills that AI extracts from the document, and gives each profile a match score. In our recruitment system we use AI to look for assignments that suit your CV and your interim profile. We also use AI to turn an uploaded document into an assignment and to answer your questions.

These are tools. A matching profile is a suggestion: people decide whether contact follows, and that contact goes through Hero. A recruiter assesses a match before we contact you. We do not make decisions that come about fully automatically and that have legal effects for you or otherwise significantly affect you.

You have the right to view your data, to correct it, to have it erased or to have its processing restricted. You can also have your data transferred and withdraw consent you gave earlier.

Right to object. If we process your data on the basis of legitimate interest, you can always object to this on grounds relating to your particular situation. We will then stop that processing, unless we have compelling grounds that override your interests, or we need the data for legal claims.

Much of this you can arrange yourself via My account.

Do you have another privacy request? Email privacy@hero.eu. We will respond within 30 days.

Not satisfied? Then you can file a complaint with the Dutch Data Protection Authority, or with the data protection authority in the country where you live or work.

Yes. We may adjust this privacy statement if our services, the law or the way we process personal data changes. The most current version is always on this page.

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