Job Applicant Privacy Notice

What is a privacy notice?

We want to ensure that as part of our recruitment process you are aware and understand what information we collect about you, how we will use it and for what purpose. We are also required by data protection legislation to explain certain matters to you.

Data Protection Principles

We will comply with data protection law and principles which means that your data will be:

  • Used lawfully, fairly and in a transparent way.
  • Collected only for valid purposes that we have clearly explained to you and not used in any way that is incompatible with those purposes.
  • Relevant to the purposes we have told you about limited only to those purposes.
  • Accurate and kept up to date.
  • Kept only as long as necessary for the purposes we have told you about.
  • Kept securely.

What information about you will we collect and use?

As part of any recruitment process whether for a specific vacancy (which may or may not be advertised) or as part of a speculative search, the Company [1] will collect store and process personal information about you, as a job applicant.

This personal information will usually include your:

  • name, address, contact details including email address and telephone number;
  • details of your qualifications, skills, experience and employment history;
  • information about your current level of remuneration including benefit entitlements;
  • any other information you have provided to us voluntarily (including but not limited to date or birth, gender and marital status);
  • whether or not you have a disability for which the Company needs to make reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process; and
  • information about your entitlement to work in the UK.

The Company collects the above information in a variety of ways. For example, data may be contained in application forms, new starter forms, CVs or information supplied by recruitment agencies, obtained from your passport or other identity documents, or collected through interviews or other forms of assessment.

The Company will also collect personal data about you from third parties, such as references supplied by former employers or other individuals identified by you.  The Company will seek information from third parties only once a job offer to you has been made and will inform you that it will be seeking such information.

How and why will we use your personal information?

As you will appreciate, we need to use your personal information to process your application and determine your suitability for the role, carry out reference checks, communicate with you about the recruitment process, keep records on our hiring process and we also need to ensure that we comply with our legal obligations.

In most cases the legal basis for processing the data will be to ensure that we are complying with our legal obligations or where we need to in order to further the Company’s legitimate business interests.

The situations in which we will commonly use your personal information include:

  • to make informed recruitment decisions;
  • to follow our vetting processes;
  • to take steps to decide whether to enter into a contract with you.

We may also need to process personal data from job applicants in order to respond to and defend against any legal claims.

Data processed will be stored in a range of different places including in hard and electronic HR files and IT systems (including email and our HR and recruitment databases).

We are guided by the principle that you should not be surprised by any use we make of your personal information.

What happens if you do not provide personal information?

You are under no statutory or contractual obligation to provide data to the Company during the recruitment process. However, if you do not provide the information to us when requested, the Company may not be able to process your application properly or at all. For example, in the event that we offer employment to you, we are required to verify your right to work in the UK.  If you do not provide the necessary information to enable us to do this, we would be unable to continue with your application and your offer of employment would be withdrawn.

How we use particularly sensitive information

We will use information about your disability status to consider whether we need to provide appropriate adjustments during the recruitment process, for example, adjustments required for an interview or assessment.

Information about criminal convictions

We will collect information about your unspent criminal convictions history if we would like to offer you the role (conditional on checks and any other conditions, such as references, being satisfactory).

Who has access to your personal data?

Your personal data will be shared internally for the purposes of the recruitment exercise. This includes members of the HR team, interviewers involved in the recruitment process, managers in the business area with a vacancy and IT staff if access to the data is necessary for the performance of their roles.

The Company will not share your data with third parties unless your application for employment is successful and we make you an offer of employment. We then may share information with appropriate third parties which may include:

  • Our occupational health providers (Optima) in relation to any pre-employment medical questionnaire/examination;
  • Previous employers, or named individuals as part of a reference request process;

All our third-party service providers and other entities in the group are required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal information in line with our policies. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes. We only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

The Company will not transfer your data outside the European Economic Area.

For how long will your personal information be kept?

If your application for employment is successful, you will be sent a new privacy notice for members of the workforce. Information gathered during the recruitment exercise will be transferred.

If your application for employment is unsuccessful, your personal data will be retained for one year from the close of the recruitment campaign; this will enable us to deal with any potential or actual disputes or investigations relating to the recruitment exercise or to identify your suitability for any future roles that may arise within the Company. At the end of that period, your data will be deleted or destroyed.

In circumstances in which you send us a speculative application and there is no suitable vacancy available, the Company will keep your personal data for one year in case there are future employment opportunities with the Company which may be appropriate. At the end of that period, your data will be deleted or destroyed.

How will your personal information be kept safe?

We take the security of your personal information very seriously and we have put in place internal controls and security measures to protect it. Access to your personal information is restricted to those employees, workers and agents who strictly need it as part of the recruitment process (see above) and access to HR files (both electronic and hard copy) is restricted to members of the HR team. We also have cyber security measures in place.

We take steps to ensure that third parties who have access to your personal data only process it on our instructions and are subject to a duty of confidentiality. We have put in place appropriate procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach.

What is automated decision making?

Automated decision making is when a decision is taken using personal data which processed is solely by automatic means (i.e. without any human intervention). We confirm that the Company’s recruitment processes are not based solely on automated decision-making.

What are your rights in relation to your personal information?

 You have certain rights in relation to your personal data as summarised here. For more information on your rights please see the contact details for the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at the bottom of this notice:

  • Right to be informed – you have the right to be provided with clear, transparent and easily understandable information about how we use your personal data and your rights; this is why we are providing you with this privacy notice;
  • Right of access – you can request access to your personal data (commonly known as a subject access request);
  • Correcting or erasing your information – where we hold information about you that is inaccurate or incomplete, you have the right to ask us to rectify or complete it. You have the right to ask is to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask the Company to delete or remove personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing;
  • Right to restrict processing – you have the right to restrict some processing of your personal information, which means that you can ask us to limit what we do with it;
  • Right to object to processing – you can object to us processing your personal information in certain circumstances, including where we are using it for the purpose of the Company’s legitimate business interests;
  • Right to request transfer – you have the right to request the transfer of your persoan information to another party;
  • Right to withdraw consent – you have the right to withdraw consent for specific processing of your personal information at any time;

Right to complain – you have a right to lodge a complaint about the way we handle or process your information with the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office www.ico.org.uk). However, we take our obligations seriously, so if you have any questions or concerns, we would encourage you to raise them with us first, so that we can try to resolve them. 

Questions?

If you have any questions about anything in this privacy notice, please contact us on hrinfo@quintain.co.uk.

Dated: March 2024

[1] For the purpose of this Privacy Notice, the Company means the entity within the Quintain group to which you are making an application for employment.  This is will usually be Quintain Services Limited, Quintain Living Limited, QWR Services E Limited and/or QWR Services W Limited but may refer to any company within the group.