Terms of service

1. Who you are contracting with

Finance Hiring Lab is a trading name of Gravitate Recruitment Ltd, a private limited company registered in England and Wales (company number 14202736). Registered office: Queensgate House, 48 Queen Street, Exeter, EX4 3SR, United Kingdom. VAT number GB425780485. In these terms, "we" and "us" mean Gravitate Recruitment Ltd trading as Finance Hiring Lab. You can contact us at [email protected] or write to our registered office.

The Finance Hiring Health Check is for UK employers buying for their trade, business or profession. You must be authorised to place the order for the named business. A sole trader may buy for their business. We do not accept orders made wholly or mainly for personal purposes. A declaration does not remove any rights a person has as a consumer under applicable law. If you believe you have ordered as a consumer, contact us promptly so we can address the order and your statutory rights.

Gravitate Recruitment Ltd also operates a recruitment business. The Health Check is a separate paid assessment service of the same company. This order does not include candidate searches, introductions or placement services.

2. What the Health Check includes

Each order covers one UK finance vacancy and one submitted brief. We provide one written report covering the business case and a hire, reshape or pause recommendation; role level and title; salary and package clarity; location and flexibility; essential and desirable requirements; a revised job description or role brief; a candidate advert; suggested interview stages and timeline; a structured interview scorecard; and a seven-day action plan.

Within seven calendar days of delivery you may request either up to two written questions about the report, sent through your order page and answered in writing, or one 15-minute call about the report, by arrangement. A revised report and a second vacancy are not included. We answer written questions, or offer a call time, within two working days of the request. Written questions are submitted through your order page. Calls are arranged with us. If you request it in time, this applies even if the answer or call falls after the seven days.

Clarification explains the existing report. A materially changed role (for example a different title, seniority, responsibilities, reporting line or location, where it changes the assessment) is a new Health Check, not a clarification. Following a role change recommended in the report does not by itself require another purchase. We apply this boundary reasonably, explain why a new order is needed and confirm its current price before you commit. Correcting a failure to provide the agreed service is never charged as a new order.

2A. How the report is produced

We assess your brief for completeness and prepare a draft with AI assistance using the facts and role material you provide. Salary context, where included, comes from Finance Hiring Lab's salary reference. We use automated quality checks. Every report is checked by a finance recruitment specialist before release, and nothing is released automatically: a report is released to you only after it has passed the automated checks and that specialist check.

AI-assisted drafting can produce errors. Our review is part of the service and does not remove our obligation to use reasonable care and skill. We remain responsible for the service we supply. We describe the AI provider and how personal information is processed in our privacy notice. We may change tools, but will maintain the agreed confidentiality, data protection and specialist review requirements and meet any notification requirements in the processing schedule.

2B. Data

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Office for National Statistics. This does not mean the Office for National Statistics endorses Finance Hiring Lab or its reports.

3. Scope and responsible use

The Health Check supports your assessment of a vacancy. It is not legal, tax, regulated financial, employment law or professional HR advice. It does not guarantee that a role is lawful, affordable, attractive to candidates or successfully filled. You remain responsible for budget approval and hiring, pay and employment decisions.

Salary information is indicative context, not a valuation or an instruction on what to pay. Reports never invent salary figures; salary ranges come from Finance Hiring Lab's salary reference. Where our salary reference has no suitable figure for the role and region, the report says so rather than inventing one, and any figure is checked by the specialist before release.

Before publishing or using any advert, job description or interview material, you must check its accuracy, suitability and compliance with applicable employment, equality, accessibility and advertising requirements. This does not exclude responsibility for our own failure to use reasonable care and skill. Obtain appropriate advice where needed, especially where a requirement might disadvantage a protected group.

4. Ordering, payment and contract formation

Complete the brief, review and correct your answers, read and accept these terms and the customer data processing schedule, and confirm the business and submission declarations before continuing to Stripe Checkout. Contracts are made in English. The price and the total including VAT are shown before payment. You can save or print these terms.

Your paid order is an offer to buy the service. A contract forms when we send the order acceptance email. A payment receipt or automated payment acknowledgement alone is not acceptance. We will accept or decline promptly and will not start drafting before acceptance. If we decline, we return the full payment. Acceptance does not move the delivery deadline calculated under section 5 to a later time.

We keep the order record and the version of these terms you accepted, and the acceptance email links to a copy. Your private order page shows the order status, and you may ask us for a copy of your contract record. Changes to these terms apply to future orders; an existing order changes only by agreement or where a change is legally required.

Price. Prices are shown excluding VAT, and VAT is added at the standard rate. The first five paid Health Checks across the service are £99 + VAT; after those five orders, the price is £249 + VAT. The launch price of £99 plus £19.80 VAT is £118.80 in total and the standard price of £249 plus £49.80 VAT is £298.80 in total. Both prices buy the same service. This is introductory pricing, not a claim that the later price has previously been charged. VAT is currently 20%.

Launch places. A launch place is reserved for 30 minutes during checkout. Checkout shows when the reservation expires and the final price. If a reservation expires, we show the applicable price and require your agreement before taking payment. We never add a price increase after you have paid. A reservation becomes a paid launch order only when payment is confirmed.

Payment and invoices. Stripe processes payments; we do not receive your full card details. We issue a numbered VAT invoice using the billing information you provide, normally with the order acceptance and in any event within the applicable invoicing period. A Stripe receipt is separate from the VAT invoice.

5. Delivery

Complete briefs and payments received before 12 noon UK time on a working day are delivered by 5pm the next working day. A receipt at or after 12 noon, at a weekend or on a bank holiday is treated as received on the next working day. Working days are Monday to Friday excluding bank holidays in England and Wales. All times use UK time (Europe/London).

A complete brief contains the required answers and usable role material, such as a draft job description, advert or role notes. An accepted answer of "Not known yet" does not stop the clock; it is a gap the report addresses. We will identify genuinely essential missing or unreadable information promptly and explain why it prevents a meaningful assessment. Minor uncertainties do not restart the clock.

Where essential information is missing, the delivery time is recalculated under the same rule when we receive usable information. We will tell you the revised deadline and the reason in writing. We will not extend the deadline silently. If you do not respond for 14 calendar days after our request and a reminder, we may cancel and refund the order in full.

Delivery is through your private order page, with an email notification linking to the report. We will not treat an inaccessible or unapproved report as delivered. Please download the report and editable files within 12 months of delivery, after which routine access ends in line with our retention policy.

If we miss the promised delivery deadline for reasons other than essential information you have not supplied, you may request a full refund within seven calendar days of the missed deadline. You may cancel undelivered work or agree that we continue. This remedy does not remove other rights you may have for breach of contract.

If an event outside our reasonable control affects the service, we will tell you promptly, take reasonable steps to reduce the impact and offer cancellation with a full refund if we cannot meet the promised deadline. Supplier outages or reviewer absence never permit release without review and do not override the refund protection above.

6. Your responsibilities

Provide accurate information as far as you reasonably can, identify unknowns, and make sure you are entitled to share your material and obtain this assessment. Do not submit candidate CVs, candidate records or unnecessary personal details about incumbents, managers or colleagues. Replace names with job titles and remove contact details and personal identifiers from role documents.

Do not submit health information, ethnicity, religion, union membership, other special category information, criminal offence information or unlawful, abusive or infringing material. If inappropriate personal information is found, we may pause processing, ask for a redacted copy, restrict access and delete or return the affected material. Our own data protection responsibilities continue to apply. The customer data processing schedule forms part of these terms where we handle personal information on your behalf.

7. Confidentiality and separation from recruitment

Each party will protect the other's confidential information and use it only to perform this contract, administer the order, comply with law or establish, exercise or defend legal claims. We may disclose it to people and service providers who need it for those purposes and are subject to appropriate confidentiality obligations. We remain responsible for our contractual obligations when using service providers.

Confidentiality does not apply to information already lawfully known without restriction, independently developed without using the confidential information, lawfully received from another source, or public other than through a breach. Disclosure required by law is permitted, with advance notice where lawful.

We will not use the brief, uploads, report, buyer contact details or knowledge obtained through the Health Check about your hiring plans for recruitment sourcing, candidate introductions, role marketing or recruitment sales outreach. Access by a reviewer who also works in the recruitment business does not authorise that reuse. Any separately requested recruitment work needs a separate instruction and appropriate terms. Our optional Finance Hiring Lab insights emails do not authorise recruitment outreach.

8. Intellectual property and use

You keep your rights in the information and documents you supply. You give us a limited right to use them to provide and administer this service, subject to these terms and the processing schedule. We do not acquire a right to use them for recruitment outreach or general AI model training.

On payment, to the extent that we own or can license the relevant rights, we grant you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to use, copy, adapt and share the customer-specific report and hiring material for your business's hiring purposes. This includes publishing the advert, using the job description and scorecard, and sharing them with your advisers or recruitment providers for that vacancy. Those recipients may use them for your hiring purposes, not as products for resale.

We keep our rights in pre-existing methods, templates, tools and general know-how. You may use elements embedded in the output as needed to exercise the licence. AI-assisted content may not be unique, and exclusive copyright may not arise in every element; we do not promise exclusivity. You must not resell the report as a standalone competing product.

9. Cancellation, refunds and defects

You may cancel by email or through your order page. Before substantive work begins, we refund the order in full. If you cancel after substantive work begins but before delivery, we may keep only a reasonable proportion of the fee for work actually completed, with a written explanation. That amount cannot exceed the order fee. No charge is made for work not done or for avoidable costs after cancellation.

After delivery, a change of mind or disagreement with a reasonably prepared recommendation does not itself create a refund entitlement. If the service is materially incomplete or fails to meet the contract, tell us and we will investigate and correct it within a reasonable time at no extra charge. If correction is impossible, not provided within a reasonable time or does not resolve the failure, we will provide an appropriate price reduction or refund, including a full refund where appropriate. These remedies are not limited by the clarification allowance.

We may decline or cancel an order outside the UK finance vacancy scope, where we lack capacity, or where we cannot safely or lawfully deliver it. If we cancel for those reasons, we refund in full. We do not keep payment for a service we will not supply.

We initiate agreed refunds through Stripe to the original payment method within five working days and issue a VAT credit note. Your bank or payment provider may take longer to show the funds. We do not restrict your right to raise a genuine payment dispute; please contact us first so we can try to resolve it. Any duplicate refund is reconciled so the same amount is not paid twice.

Nothing in these terms removes a consumer's statutory cancellation rights or remedies if consumer law applies despite the intended business scope. We do not treat acceptance of these business terms as an early performance request or a waiver of consumer cancellation rights.

10. Liability

We will provide the service with reasonable care and skill. Nothing excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited. Nothing restricts an individual's statutory data protection rights or the powers of a regulator.

Subject to the preceding paragraph, our total liability to you arising from or connected with an order, whether in contract, negligence or otherwise, is limited to £10,000 for that order. Refunds expressly due under these terms are payable in addition to that cap. The cap does not limit your obligation to pay the agreed order price.

Subject to the same exceptions, we are not liable for losses that are indirect or consequential under the applicable law. We do not exclude a loss merely by calling it a recruitment cost, lost profit or hiring loss if it is otherwise a recoverable direct loss. Any claim remains subject to the law on causation, foreseeability and mitigation. Our responsibility for AI-assisted work and for the providers we use is assessed under these terms; those features do not create a separate blanket exclusion.

11. Complaints and contact

Email [email protected] with your order reference and the issue, or write to our registered office. We aim to acknowledge service complaints within five working days and give a substantive response within 20 working days. If more time is needed, we explain why and give an updated timetable. You do not have to exhaust this process before exercising legal rights.

For privacy complaints, use the same contact and say that it is a privacy concern. We acknowledge data protection complaints within 30 days of receipt, investigate without undue delay, keep you informed and explain the outcome. You may also contact the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint. The privacy notice explains your rights.

12. Law and general terms

These terms and disputes arising from the service are governed by the law of England and Wales. For business contracts, the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. Mandatory rights and jurisdiction protections that apply to a consumer are preserved.

A person who is not a party has no right under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 to enforce these terms. If a provision is unenforceable, the remaining provisions continue so far as legally possible. A delay in enforcing a right does not waive it. We will not transfer the contract in a way that materially reduces your rights without your agreement. Your statutory rights and mandatory legal protections take priority over inconsistent wording.