How to answer
Do employees and contractors sign confidentiality agreements?
The contractor is why this is being asked. "All employees sign an NDA" answers precisely the half of the question nobody was worried about.
Yes. Confidentiality obligations are included in the standard employment agreement signed by every employee before their start date, and in the contract signed by every contractor with access to customer data. The obligations survive the end of the engagement.
FillTrust grades an answer like this implied, not stated when your documents support it.
- Answered from
- Your employment agreement template, and whatever you use for contractors.
- Evidence to attach
- Never the signed agreements. Occasionally the clause itself, or a statement that one exists in every contract.
- Where it is asked
- CAIQ v4.0 · HRS-10SIG Lite
This is one of the few questions where the true answer is almost always yes and the written answer is often wrong anyway.
Confidentiality language sits inside the standard employment agreement at nearly every company, which means the obligation exists and nobody has read it recently. The answer given is usually a general yes, and the follow-up, which document, and does it cover contractors, is the one that stalls.
Contractors are the point of the question. A reviewer asking about confidentiality is picturing the freelance developer with production access, the agency that ran a migration, the fractional CTO who left in March. If your answer covers employees only, you have confirmed the case they were not worried about and left the one they were.
Check that it survives the engagement. Confidentiality obligations that end with employment are a drafting error rather than a policy, but they exist, and they are exactly what a legal reviewer looks for. If the clause is silent on survival, that is worth knowing before somebody else finds it.
Founders count. In small companies the people with the broadest access frequently signed nothing, because there was nobody to sign an agreement with at the time. It is a five-minute fix and a bad thing to discover during diligence.
Why this often comes back as UNSURE rather than a confident yes. The obligation is usually real but buried in a document that is not a security policy, so retrieval finds an employment template rather than a control statement. That is the honest grade: something in your documents implies it and nothing states it, which is a different thing from having it written down.
How this one goes wrong
Specific to this question, not general advice.
- Answering for employees and forgetting contractors. The contractor is usually the reason the question is being asked, and "all employees sign an NDA" is a precise answer to a question nobody asked.
- Having the clause inside an employment agreement and not knowing it is there. It usually is. Look before answering, because the follow-up asks which document it lives in.
- Not knowing whether the obligation survives termination. A confidentiality clause that lapses on the last day is close to useless, and it is the detail a legal reviewer checks first.
- Founders who never signed anything themselves. Common in small companies, easy to fix, and awkward to discover during diligence rather than before it.