Where does my data actually live?
Start here, because every other answer depends on it. Most AI tools are cloud services. The moment you connect your email or upload a candidate file, a copy of your desk starts accumulating on someone else's infrastructure, governed by their retention rules and their security posture. That isn't automatically disqualifying, but the vendor has to say it plainly: which servers, which country, held for how long. If the answer takes a paragraph of qualifiers, you've learned something.
RecruiterClaw's answer is shorter. It runs on a seat dedicated to your firm, and that's where everything lives: memory, client profiles, conversation history, candidate files. Nothing is pooled with other clients. Even document handling stays on your seat. Drop a scanned resume or an iPhone photo of a signed agreement into Slack and it is read on your seat through your own AI subscription, never uploaded to a shared service.
Who can see it?
Ask who on the vendor's side can access your data. Support engineers? Anyone with a database credential? And ask about your own side too: some cloud tools connect integrations once for a whole workspace, which quietly widens who can act through them. Your candidate notes and client fee structures are your competitive edge. You want to know exactly whose eyes can land on them, and you want the answer as a list of roles, not a link to a trust portal.
RecruiterClaw's answer follows from the architecture: there is no shared database with everyone's desks in it. Your seat is reachable by the small team that runs it, for support and updates, and by no one else. Your desk sits on a seat dedicated to your firm, and nothing is pooled with anyone else's. The line we use is the policy: your data stays yours.
What trains on it?
Ask directly: does anything I type, upload, or connect feed model training? Is staying out of training the default, or a setting buried three menus deep? This is where a vendor's incentives show. Your data is valuable to them in exact proportion to how much of it they hold. A vendor that hesitates on this question is telling you something useful.
For RecruiterClaw the question is settled structurally. Your seat is yours alone, so there is no pooled store of candidate files, client notes, or conversations across clients, and we never train on your data.
What happens when I cancel?
The quiet horror scenario: you finally leave a tool, and years of notes, contacts, and history either export as a useless dump or don't export at all. So ask before you connect anything. What leaves with me, in what format? What do you retain after I'm gone, and for how long? Get the answer in writing while they still want your signature.
With RecruiterClaw there is nothing to export and no one to petition, because every document it made for you is already in your own RecruiterClaw folder. Stop the service and those files stay exactly where they are. Your seat's memory and credentials are deleted when the seat is retired.
How are credentials stored?
An AI chief of staff holds keys: your email, your calendar, your ATS. So ask where those tokens live. Sitting in a plain-text configuration file, they are a compromised laptop away from becoming everyone's problem. You want them in encrypted storage, and you want the vendor to know the answer cold, without checking with engineering.
RecruiterClaw keeps credentials in a locked store on your seat that only your seat can read. Not in a text file, and not in a shared vault.
How do you run this conversation?
Send the five questions ahead of the demo, in an email, so nobody has to improvise. Then listen for the shape of the answers. Policy answers sound like "we would never" and "our team is trained to." Structural answers sound like "that's impossible in our design," and each one can be explained in a sentence. Structural beats policy every time, because a policy needs enforcing and architecture doesn't.
The same lens applies once the AI is inside your systems and writing to them. If you're weighing what write access to your ATS should look like, we covered that safety model in its own guide: Is it safe to let AI write to your ATS? Between the two pages, you have the full interrogation kit. Use it on us first.
Where does RecruiterClaw store my recruiting data?
On your own seat. Memory, client profiles, conversation history, and candidate files live on a seat dedicated to your firm and in your own RecruiterClaw folder. Nothing is pooled with other clients, and documents are read on your seat through your own AI subscription, never uploaded to a shared service.
Does RecruiterClaw train AI models on my candidate data?
There is no vendor-held pool of your data to train on. Your desk lives on your own seat, never in a shared pool, and we never train on it. That is a design decision, not a policy you have to trust.
What happens to my RecruiterClaw data if I cancel?
Everything RecruiterClaw made for you is already in your own RecruiterClaw folder in your Google Drive or OneDrive, so there is no export to request. When your seat is retired we delete its memory and credentials. Nothing of yours lingers in a vendor pool.
How does RecruiterClaw store email and ATS credentials?
In a locked store on your seat that only your seat can read. Not in plain-text configuration files, and not in a shared vendor vault.
What does a good answer from any AI vendor sound like?
Structural, short, and in plain English. A vendor that says a risk is impossible by design, and can explain why in a sentence, is giving you a stronger guarantee than one reciting policies about what their team would never do.