Friends of WhyBrilliant — Programme Terms
WhyBrilliant GmbH | Last updated: September 2026
These are the terms of the "Friends of WhyBrilliant" referral programme. They form the contract between you (a "Friend") and WhyBrilliant GmbH when you join. Section 9 is the privacy notice for the programme: it explains, under Art. 13 GDPR, how we process your own personal data as a Friend.
1. What this programme is
WhyBrilliant GmbH ("WhyBrilliant", "we", "us") operates a recruiting service. If you introduce a company that is hiring, and that company subsequently hires through us, we pay you a share of the fee we receive.
You are a "Friend". You are not our employee, our agent, or our representative. You may not present yourself as any of those, negotiate on our behalf, or make commitments in our name.
2. Joining
2.1 Anyone may join. You provide a name and an email address; we give you a personal referral link. You do not need an account with us and you do not need to be a customer.
2.2 Joining does not by itself entitle you to any payment. Before we can pay you anything, we must activate your participation (Section 4.1). We may decline to activate, and we may suspend your participation at any time, with reasons.
2.3 You may leave at any time by telling us. Commissions already due to you at that point remain due.
3. What counts as a valid introduction
3.1 Net-new companies only. An introduction counts when a company that is new to us creates its account through your link. If we were already working with that company, or already in contact with them, the introduction does not count. We record every introduction that does not count, together with the reason, and you can see this on your referral page.
3.2 First touch wins. Each company can be credited to one Friend only — the first whose link they used.
3.3 Your own employer does not count. You may not introduce a company you work for, own, or direct. This is not negotiable and we check for it.
3.4 How you may introduce. You write to people you actually have a relationship with, from your own mailbox. You must not send unsolicited bulk email, and you must not use our name, branding, or materials to make it look as though the message comes from us. You are responsible for the lawfulness of your own outreach, including under the German Act Against Unfair Competition (UWG) and the GDPR, and you indemnify us against claims arising from it.
3.5 We may reject an introduction that breaches this section, and may suspend your participation.
4. What you earn, and how you are paid
4.1 The commission. You earn a percentage of the placement fee we actually receive from the company (excluding VAT), for every hire that company makes within the referral window. The applicable percentage and window are shown on your referral page and in the email confirming your introduction; unless we agree otherwise with you in writing, they are 20% and 12 months from the date the company joined. There is no cap on the number of hires or the number of companies you introduce.
4.2 When it becomes due. A commission becomes due only once the company has paid our invoice for that placement in full. We never pay out money we have not received. The rate that applies is the one in force when the commission becomes due; a later change to your rate does not alter a commission that is already due, and does not alter a referral window that is already running.
4.3 How the money reaches you. We notify you when a commission is due. You then invoice us, and we pay within a reasonable period of receiving a correct invoice. We do not hold your bank details — they reach us on your invoice.
4.4 No clawback. If we later refund a company, we do not reclaim a commission we have already paid you.
4.5 Reversal before payment. If a placement falls through before we have paid you, the commission lapses. We tell you when this happens and why.
5. Tax
The commission is income. You are responsible for declaring and taxing it according to the law that applies to you. We cannot give you tax advice, and nothing here is tax advice. If you are unsure whether you should be invoicing us privately or as a business, tell us before invoicing and we will not guess on your behalf.
6. What we tell other people about you, and about them
6.1 We tell you the name of a company that joins through your link, so that you can tell which of your introductions landed. We do not tell you who they hired, what the role was, or what anybody is paid.
6.2 Because your commission is a percentage of our fee, the amount you are paid does allow an approximate salary to be inferred. We therefore keep the money notifications free of any company or candidate detail. You must treat everything you learn through this programme as confidential and must not disclose it.
6.3 We tell a company that joins through a referral link that they arrived through one, that a Friend may be told they joined, and that a commission may become payable. It costs the company nothing extra.
6.4 How we handle your own data is described in our Privacy Policy.
7. Changing or ending the programme
7.1 We may change these terms or end the programme. We will tell you in advance by email. Commissions already due are unaffected, and a referral window already running continues to its end on the terms that applied when it started.
7.2 We may suspend or remove you if you breach Section 3, if we reasonably suspect fraud, or if the relationship becomes untenable. Commissions already due at that point remain due unless the breach is the reason they arose.
8. Liability and law
8.1 We are liable without limitation for intent and gross negligence, and for injury to life, body, or health. For slight negligence we are liable only for breach of a material contractual obligation, limited to foreseeable damage typical for this kind of contract.
8.2 German law applies. Where you are a consumer, mandatory consumer protection provisions of your country of habitual residence continue to apply.
8.3 If any provision is invalid, the remainder stays in force.
9. Your personal data as a Friend (privacy notice, Art. 13 GDPR)
This section tells you how we process your own personal data when you take part in this programme. It is provided as information under Art. 13 GDPR; it is a notice, not a term you agree to. How we handle everyone else's data — Talents, Companies, and website visitors — is described in our general Privacy Policy.
9.1 Who is responsible (controller). The data controller is WhyBrilliant GmbH, c/o AI Campus Berlin, Max-Urich-Straße 3, 13355 Berlin, Germany (privacy@whybrilliant.com). We have appointed an external Data Protection Officer, Kertos GmbH (Dr. Kilian Schmidt), dsb@kertos.io.
9.2 What we process. As a Friend, we process:
- Contact data: the name and email address you give us when you join.
- Programme data: your referral code and personal referral link, an
unguessable access token that lets you open your own referral page without an account, your agreed commission rate and referral window, and whether your participation is pending, active, or suspended.
- Attribution and payment data: the companies credited to you, the resulting
commissions and their status, and our correspondence with you about them.
We do not collect your bank details. Your payment details reach us on the invoice you send us; they are not stored in the platform.
9.3 Why we process it, and on what legal basis. We use your data to give you your referral link and referral page, to tell you when a company you introduced joins and when a commission becomes due or is paid, to calculate and record what we owe you, and to keep the records of payments we are required to keep. The legal basis is performance of a contract with you (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) — these programme terms — and, for records of payments made, **compliance with our legal obligations (Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR)**. The messages we send you about your introductions and commissions are transactional — they are about something you asked us to do — so they are not marketing and carry no unsubscribe link; if you no longer want them, tell us and we will end your participation.
9.4 Who receives it. Your data is processed by us and by the sub-processors that operate our platform (hosting, database, and email delivery), each under a data-processing agreement and configured to process data within the European Economic Area. The full sub-processor list is in our Privacy Policy. We tell a company that joins through your link only that it joined and may owe a commission (Section 6.1); we do not otherwise share your data, and we do not sell it.
9.5 Whether you have to provide it. Providing your name and email is a requirement for taking part: without them we cannot give you a referral link or pay you. You are under no obligation to join, and you may leave at any time (Section 2.3).
9.6 How long we keep it. We keep your programme data for the duration of your participation. Where a commission has been paid, the payment records are retained for 10 years pursuant to German commercial and tax law (§§ 238, 257 HGB; § 147 AO); we can end your participation and remove your contact details at your request without touching those accounting records, which are kept in a form that no longer serves the programme.
9.7 Your rights. You have the right of access (Art. 15), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction (Art. 18), data portability (Art. 20), and to object to processing (Art. 21), subject to the legal retention obligations above. To exercise any of these, contact privacy@whybrilliant.com. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority (Art. 77 GDPR); ours is the Berliner Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit (BlnBDI), Friedrichstraße 219, 10969 Berlin, datenschutz-berlin.de.
Contact: privacy and data questions to privacy@whybrilliant.com or our Data Protection Officer (Section 9.1); everything else by replying to any email we send you about the programme.