Recruitment Agreement with clients – Intellectual Property and Confidentiality clause

Your Recruitment Agreement sets out the relationship between the business who requires employees (the client) and your business who provides candidates.

As a part of your recruitment services, you may be providing materials to clients, such as workbooks, guides to hiring employees, templates or employee handbooks. You may also be providing individualised or personalised intellectual property, or you may be developing job descriptions, advertisements for candidates, or other materials.

Intellectual Property

Any material that you develop and create is owned by you, so there are two ways that this intellectual property can be dealt with. In general, the work that you develop for your recruitment services can be licensed to clients, for example you can provide a non-exclusive licence to the client to use the general materials. You can assign the material you specifically develop for the client, so that only they can use this material. You can also provide limits on how the material is used. For example, it might be that the client can only use the material for business and internal purposes. You might consider including a clause that states that the client must not breach your copyright by altering or modifying any of your materials, creating derivative works from the materials or using materials for commercial gain. Any work that is specifically developed by you for the client will usually not be assigned until the client has paid you the final invoice.

You may also be providing material that requires approval and checking by clients. In these cases, the client should be responsible for proofing and approving all materials specifically drafted by you for them. Once the material is published, you will not be responsible for any errors or changes required.

Confidentiality

During your relationship with the client, you will require the client to provide you with some confidential information about their business, such as salaries and business structure, which will assist you in matching them with a candidate. If the client is an individual person rather than a business, you should make sure they agree that their personal information may also be disclosed to potential candidates. The client will also be provided with confidential information about potential candidates, such as their CV, referees and other personal details. You should ensure that they agree not to disclose any of this information and only use it to assess the candidate’s suitability for the position. They should not use the information to circumvent the services. The client should also agree to only disclose information if they are required by law to do so for certain purposes, such as tax. Since you are collecting personal information as part of your services, you should also make sure you have a Privacy Policy in place and handle personal information in accordance with your Privacy Policy.

Conclusion

Having a thorough and detailed Recruitment Agreement that includes a strong intellectual property and confidential information clause can protect your business’ assets. We can also assist you with a variety of other IP issues, such as trade mark protection and intellectual property licences. So if you’re in need of legal advice in relation to contracts or IP, contact LegalVision on 1300 544 755 and speak with one of our experienced IP solicitors today.