Active Directory hygiene for a fully remote recruiting team

Staffing firms handle sensitive candidate data — resumes, SSNs on W2 paperwork, background check results — across a fully remote team. Most breaches at firms this size don't come from sophisticated attacks; they come from basic identity hygiene gaps.

The practices that matter most

• Offboarding on the same day, not the same week. A former recruiter's ATS and email access should end the moment they leave, not at the next IT review cycle.
• Role-based access groups. Recruiters, account managers and finance shouldn't share the same access tier by default.
• MFA on every account that touches candidate PII, not just email.
• Regular access audits to catch accounts that accumulated permissions over time and never had them revoked.

Why this is worth the effort

None of this requires an enterprise security budget — it requires consistency. Most incidents we see trace back to one skipped offboarding step, not a sophisticated attack.