Compliance officer manual

Welcome. As a compliance officer you own the parts of a hire a donor will later ask about: the safeguarding declarations, the reference checks, and the audit trail that ties them together. Your job is to make each hire defensible — to record the evidence, cleanly and in one place, so that when someone reviews the process months from now it holds up.

One thing to be clear about from the start: you record the evidence; HR finalizes the hire. You can read a role's applications and open any candidate's compliance panel, but you do not screen candidates and you do not press the button that makes a hire final. That separation is deliberate — it's what keeps compliance independent of the hiring decision, and it's exactly the kind of separation of duties a donor expects to see. This manual covers your surface and says plainly where the line sits.

HeadHunter only ever shows you actions your role can take, so you won't see buttons for work that isn't yours — no "shortlist," no "reject," no "finalize hire." That's by design, and it keeps your screen focused on the record.

A few rules that hold everywhere

• The interface is bilingual (English / العربية) and right-to-left aware. Switch language any time; the platform keeps your place. Dates are shown as YYYY-MM-DD.
• Records are audited, never silently deleted. Everything you record — a declaration, a reference, a status change — leaves an honest, timestamped trail with your name on it. That trail is the product here; treat it as the donor-facing document it will become.
• Scoring is explainable, not a black box. You won't be scoring anyone, but you'll see that the ranking a hire came from is backed by CV evidence — part of the same defensibility your work completes.
• No candidate data is shared across organizations without the candidate's explicit consent. The evidence you record stays inside your org's hire record.

Getting in and finding your way

Sign in with your email and password on the login page (if your organization uses two-step verification, you'll enter a one-time code too). The first time, you'll be asked to set your own password. Your account settings — Account → Password and Account → Security, where you can turn on two-step verification — are yours to manage. At the bottom of your sidebar you'll find the User manual (this page), the language toggle, and sign out.

Your dashboard — evidence still owed

Signing in takes you to your Dashboard, framed around the number that defines your work: how many hires-in-progress are still awaiting compliance sign-off — the ones whose declarations or references aren't yet complete. That headline is your queue.

Below it, What needs you now breaks that queue into the specific evidence still owed, each a card with an exact count that jumps you to the right compliance panel:

• Reference checks still awaiting a reply — requests you've sent that haven't come back.
• Reference checks overdue — the subset waiting over a week, the tail worth chasing.
• Hires missing a required declaration — an offer-stage hire whose safeguarding checklist still has a required item open. This is the gate: HR can't finalize the hire until it's cleared.

You may also see a nudge for postings closing within a week — visibility only, so you know which roles are moving toward a decision. Only work that's yours appears; when the evidence is all in, you'll see a calm "all caught up." Everything on this list is reference-only for the candidate side of things — you never manage candidate accounts or the public board; you document the hire.

Your workday: recording the compliance evidence for a hire

Find the candidate and open their compliance panel

You can view your organization's postings and their applicants — enough to navigate, not to screen. Open a posting, find the candidate being taken toward a hire, and open their Compliance panel. This is your home surface: everything you do lives here, per candidate, per posting.

The panel names the candidate, the posting, and the application's current status at the top, so you always know exactly which hire you're documenting.

Work the declarations checklist — the hire gate

The first card is the declarations checklist: the PSEA / safeguarding acknowledgements a hire must clear. Each item shows what it covers and whether it's required. For each one you record a status:

• Acknowledge — the declaration is satisfied. You can attach a short line of evidence (a note, a reference, where the signed form lives) alongside it.
• Waive — the declaration doesn't apply to this hire, recorded deliberately rather than left blank.

A header pill tells you at a glance whether the checklist is complete or how many items are still outstanding. This checklist is the gate: HR cannot finalize the hire until the required declarations are recorded. That's why your work here matters — you're not doing paperwork after the decision, you're clearing the path that lets the decision be made at all. Every acknowledgement stamps your name and the time, so the record shows who attested to what, and when.

Capture reference checks

The second card is reference checks. Add a referee by name (and a contact, if you have one), and HeadHunter records the request. When you add a referee, the platform sends a best-effort request email on your behalf — a courtesy, not a guarantee it will be answered. As replies come in, update each reference's status:

• Requested — asked, awaiting a reply (the starting state).
• Received — the reference came back; add your notes on what it said.
• Declined — the referee won't or can't respond.

Each reference carries the dates it was requested and received, so the timeline is self-documenting. Record what you actually heard, in the referee's own words where it matters — this is evidence, not a summary you'd want to defend loosely.

Where your part ends

Once the declarations are complete and the references are captured, your work on that candidate is done. The Finalize hire action does not appear on your panel — it belongs to the HR manager, who confirms the hire once your evidence is in place. If you're looking for a "hire" button and not finding it, nothing is broken: that decision sits with HR by design, resting on the record you built.

The audit trail: view and export

Beyond individual hires, you can see the whole organization's audit trail — the honest, chronological record of what happened across the platform: who did what, to which record, and when. Open Audit from your sidebar.

• Filter the log by action, and by a from / to date range, to narrow it to the period or activity a review is asking about.
• Export to CSV to hand a donor or auditor the trail as a file. The export carries the same filters as your current view (action, date range) but the whole filtered set, not just the page you're looking at — so what you export is exactly what you filtered.

You'll also see the org's audit retention setting here, but as a read-only value — how long records are kept is set by the org admin, not by you. You read and export the trail; you don't configure its policy.

What sits with other roles

So you're never hunting for a button that isn't there, here's what's deliberately outside your role — and who owns it:

• Screening candidates and building the shortlist — the recruiter and HR manager. You can read applicants to navigate to their compliance panel, but ranking, advancing, and shortlisting aren't yours.
• Finalizing a hire — the HR manager. The declarations you record are the gate; pressing the final button is their decision.
• Sending candidate replies and rejections — the HR manager, through the comms flow.
• Setting the audit retention policy, billing, users, and the AI opt-in — the org admin (see the org admin manual).

None of this is a limitation on your work — it's the separation that makes the whole hire defensible. Your part is the evidence everything else is measured against.

Quick reference

Your screen is focused on purpose: clear the declarations, capture the references, and keep the trail exportable. Do that well and every hire your organization makes can stand up to the closest look a donor cares to give it.