Overview

Confidential Communities extend the Eightfold platform's security framework, previously applied to Confidential Positions, to your talent pools. This feature allows you to restrict the visibility of sensitive hiring workflows—including all associated prospects, notes, messages, and engagement stages—to only authorized team members. This functionality is critical for use cases such as executive hiring or replacement hiring, where discreet candidate engagement is necessary to protect privacy and prevent business disruption.

Required Permissions

Create and mark a Community as Confidential

Once you have the perm_make_community_confidential permission, you can restrict access to a community.

1. Navigate to the Community: Create a new community or edit an existing one.
2. Access calibration settings: Go to the Calibrate Community page.
3. Enable confidentiality: In the Settings section, locate and select the Confidential Community checkbox.
4. Save the Settings.

The community will now display a Confidential tag in the main communities list view.

Manage prospect global visibility

Confidentiality operates on two levels: community access and individual prospect visibility in global search. Use the Make Added Prospects Confidential option to prevent prospects in the community from appearing in global search for unauthorized users.

1. Access calibration settings: Go to the Calibrate Community page for your confidential community.
2. Enable prospect confidentiality: If you have the perm_manage_confidential_candidates permission, select the checkbox labeled Make Added Prospects Confidential.
3. Add prospects: Any new prospects added to this community will now be confidential.

The prospect will not be visible in global search to users who lack the necessary permissions. The community will display a Confidential Prospects tag on the list view if all candidates within it are confidential.

Understand confidentiality restrictions

Confidentiality restricts unauthorized users from viewing the community, its prospects (if marked confidential), and any related actions taken within the community.

Hidden touchpoints

If a user does not have the required viewing permissions, the confidential community is entirely hidden from the following areas:

• Talent Communities home page search
• 'Add to a community' modal (within Positions and Profiles)
• 'Save to another community' modal (within a community)
• 'Community' search boxes (within Campaigns or Add Note sections)
• QuickSight dashboards
• Chrome extension 'Communities' Pane
• Workflow Automation

If an unauthorized user attempts to access a confidential community using a direct shared URL, the system blocks the access and displays the error message: "You do not have the required permissions".

Hidden activities on the prospect profile

When a prospect's profile is viewed by an unauthorized user, any engagement or action taken from within the confidential community is concealed. The relevant sections of the profile appear empty.

Actions that are hidden (Confidential actions):

Activities that remain visible (Non-confidential actions)

If a prospect from a confidential community is connected to an external, non-confidential project, that activity remains visible to all standard users:

• Adding the prospect to an Event (non-confidential).
• Saving the prospect to a non-confidential position pipeline or adding them to ATS for a non-confidential position.

Granting access to team members

If a user needs access to a specific confidential community but doesn't have the general perm_view_confidential_communities permission (for example, a specific Hiring Manager), you can add them directly to the community team. Users explicitly added to the team can view and/or manage the confidential community based on the role assigned to them within that team.

To grant access:

1. Open the confidential community.
2. Click the more icon and select **Community Team**.
3. Add the team member's email and assign the appropriate role.
4. Click **Save Team**.