Job Applicant Privacy Policy

Pennington Choices (“We”) are committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information.

This notice describes how we collect and use personal information about you during the recruitment process, in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We are a data controller which means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you. We are required under data protection legislation to notify you of the information contained in this privacy notice.

This notice applies to job applicants.

This notice does not form part of any contract of employment or other contract to provide services. It is important that you read this notice, together with any other privacy notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal information about you.

1. Data protection principles

We will comply with data protection law. This says that the personal information we hold about you must 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 and 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.

2. The kind of information we hold about you

We may collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you:

•  Personal contact details such as name, title, addresses, telephone numbers, and personal email addresses.
•  Date of birth.
•  Gender
•  Recruitment information (including copies of right to work documentation, proof of address, references and other information included in a CV or cover letter or as part of the application process).

We may also collect, store and use the following "special categories" of more sensitive personal information as necessary:

•  Information about your race or ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, and political opinions.
•  Information about your health, including any disability, medical condition, health, and sickness records.
•  Information about criminal convictions and offences.

3. How is your personal information collected?

We collect personal information about job applicants through the recruitment process, either directly from applicants or sometimes from an employment agency or background check provider. We may sometimes collect additional information from third parties including former employers, credit reference agencies or other background check agencies.

4. How we will use information about you

We will only use your personal information when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal information in the following circumstances:

•  Where we need to perform our recruitment process.
•  Where we need to comply with a legal obligation.
•  Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests.

We may also use your personal information in the following situations, which are likely to be rare:

•  Where we need to protect your interests (or someone else's interests).
•  Where it is needed in the public interest or for official purposes.

5. Situations in which we will use your personal information

We need all the categories of information in the list above primarily to allow us to perform our recruitment process and to enable us to comply with legal obligations. In some cases, we may use your personal information to pursue legitimate interests of our own or those of third parties, provided your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests. The situations in which we will process your personal information are listed below:

•  Making a decision about your recruitment or appointment.
•  Determining the terms on which you work for us.
•  Checking you are legally entitled to work in the UK.
•  Assessing qualifications for a particular job or task.
•  Ascertaining your fitness to work.
•  Complying with health and safety obligations.
•  Equal opportunities monitoring.

6. If you fail to provide personal information

If you fail to provide certain information when requested, we may not be able to perform the recruitment process, or we may be prevented from complying with our legal obligations (such as ensuring health and safety).

7. Change of purpose

We will only use your personal information for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If we need to use your personal information for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so. 

Please note that we may process your personal information without your knowledge or consent, in compliance with the above rules, where this is required or permitted by law.

8. How we use particularly sensitive personal information

Special categories of particularly sensitive personal information require higher levels of protection. We need to have further justification for collecting, storing, and using this type of personal information. We may process special categories of personal information in the following circumstances:

•   In limited circumstances, with your explicit written consent.
•  Where we need to carry out our legal obligations.
•  Where it is needed in the public interest, such as for equal opportunities monitoring.
•  Where it is needed to assess your working capacity on health grounds, subject to appropriate confidentiality safeguards Less commonly, we may process this type of information where it is needed in relation to legal claims or where it is needed to protect your interests (or someone else's interests) and you are not capable of giving your consent, or where you have already made the information public.

9. Our obligations as an employer

We may use your particularly sensitive personal information in the following ways:

•  Information about your physical or mental health, or disability status, to ensure your health and safety in the workplace and to assess your fitness to work.
•  Information about your race or national or ethnic origin, religious, philosophical, or moral beliefs, or your sexual life or sexual orientation, to ensure meaningful equal opportunity monitoring and reporting

10.Do we need your consent?

We do not need your consent if we use special categories of your personal information in accordance with our written policies to carry out our legal obligations or exercise specific rights in the field of employment law. In limited circumstances, we may approach you for your written consent to allow us to process certain particularly sensitive data. If we do so, we will provide you with full details of the information that we would like and the reason we need it, so that you can carefully consider whether you wish to consent. You should be aware that it is not a condition of your contract with us that you agree to any request for consent from us.

11.Information about criminal convictions

We will only collect information about criminal convictions where we are legally able to do so as part of our pre-employment check process and in adherence to government guidelines. Less commonly, we may use information relating to criminal convictions where it is necessary in relation to legal claims, where it is necessary to protect your interests (or someone else's interests).

12.Automated decision-making

Automated decision-making takes place when an electronic system uses personal information to make a decision without human intervention. We are allowed to use automated decision-making in the following circumstances:

•  Where we have notified you of the decision and given you 21 days to request a reconsideration.
•  Where it is necessary to perform the contract with you and appropriate measures are in place to safeguard your rights.
•  In limited circumstances, with your explicit written consent and where appropriate measures are in place to safeguard your rights If we make an automated decision on the basis of any particularly sensitive personal information, we must have either your explicit written consent or it must be justified in the public interest, and we must also put in place appropriate measures to safeguard your rights. You will not be subject to decisions that will have a significant impact on you based solely on automated decision-making unless we have a lawful basis for doing so and we have notified you. We do not envisage that any decisions will be taken about you using automated means, however we will notify you in writing if this position changes.

13.Data sharing with Third Parties

We will share your personal information with third parties where required by law, where it is necessary to administer the relationship with you or where we have another legitimate interest in doing so. Third-party service providers (including contractors and designated agents) carry out activities such as IT and legal services. We may share your personal information with other third parties, for example with a regulator or to otherwise comply with the law. We require third parties to respect the security of your data and to treat it in accordance with the law. All our third-party service providers 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.

14.Data security

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used, or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered, or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal information on our instructions, and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality. We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where we are legally required to do so.

15.Data retention

We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements. In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal information so that it can no longer be associated with you, in which case we may use such information without further notice to you. For unsuccessful applicants, your personal information will be kept for a period of 1 year after which point, we will securely destroy your personal information in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.

16.Your duty to inform us of changes

It is important that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal information changes during the recruitment process.

17. Your rights in connection with personal information

Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:

•  Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a "data subject access request"). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
•  Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
•  Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us 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 us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing.
•  Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.
•  Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
•  Request the transfer of your personal information to another party If you want to review, verify, correct, or request erasure of your personal information, object to the processing of your personal data, or request that we transfer a copy of your personal information to another party, please contact our Data Protection Officer in writing. In the limited circumstances where you may have provided your consent to the collection, processing, and transfer of your personal information for a specific purpose, you have the right to withdraw your consent for that specific processing at any time. To withdraw your consent, please contact our Data Protection Officer.

Once we have received notification that you have withdrawn your consent, we will no longer process your information for the purpose or purposes you originally agreed to, unless we have another legitimate basis for doing so in law.

18.Data protection officer

We have appointed a Data Protection Officer to oversee compliance with this privacy notice. If you have any questions about this privacy notice or how we handle your personal information, please contact the Data Protection Officer. You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues.

19.Changes to this privacy notice

We reserve the right to update this privacy notice at any time, and we will provide you with a new privacy notice when we make any substantial updates. We may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.