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Privacy notice for candidates

What is the purpose of this document?

Willans LLP and Willans Services Limited (the linked service company through which we recruit and employ staff) are both “data controllers”. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you. You are being sent a copy of this privacy notice because you are applying for work with us (whether as an employee, worker or contractor). It makes you aware of how and why your personal data will be used, namely for the purposes of the recruitment exercise, and how long it will usually be retained for. It provides you with certain information that must be provided under the General Data Protection Regulation ((EU) 2016/679)) as it is applied in the UK by the Data Protection Act 2018 (UK GDPR).

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 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.

The kind of information we hold about you

In connection with your application for work with us, we will collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you:

  • The information you have provided to us in your curriculum vitae and covering letter.
  • Any information you provide to us during an interview.
  • If you are applying for a secretarial post, the results of your typing test.
  • If you are applying for a post as a lawyer, the results of any technical legal test you might be asked to undertake.
  • Information about your professional, regulatory and financial history, and your credit status.
  • Information about your right to work in the UK.

We may also collect, store and use the following types of more sensitive personal information:

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

How is your personal information collected?

  • We may collect personal information about candidates from the following sources:
  • You, the candidate.
  • The recruitment agency which has introduced you to us, from which we collect the following categories of data: name, job title, qualifications, current employer, current remuneration, career history details, personal interests.
  • Disclosure and Barring Service in respect of criminal convictions.
  • Your named referees, by whom we may be provided with the following categories of data: name, job title, dates of employment, and occasionally information about your work performance, reliability and sickness record.
  • Publicly accessible social media sources such as LinkedIn and Facebook.
  • Providers of background checks who in turn rely on publicly available sources of information.

How we will use information about you

We will use the personal information we collect about you to:

  • Assess your skills, qualifications, and suitability for the role.
  • Carry out background and reference checks, where applicable.
  • Communicate with you about the recruitment process.
  • Keep records related to our hiring processes.
  • Comply with legal or regulatory requirements.

It is in our legitimate interests to decide whether to appoint you to the role you have applied for, since it would be beneficial to our business to appoint someone to that role.

We also need to process your personal information to decide whether to enter into a contract with you.

Having received your CV and covering letter, we will then process that information to decide whether you meet the basic requirements to be shortlisted for the role. If you do, we will decide whether your application is strong enough to invite you for an interview. If we decide to call you for an interview, we will use the information you provide to us at the interview, and the results of any test carried out at that time, to decide whether to offer you the role. If we decide to offer you the role, we will then take up references, and may ask you to carry out a criminal record check, before confirming your appointment.  Depending on the role you are applying for, we may also carry out additional background checks, for instance credit checks, checks on your professional, regulatory and financial history, or to verify your professional qualifications.  We will also use information you have provided us to verify your right to work in the United Kingdom.

On offering you the role we will also ask you to complete a medical questionnaire, which will assist us in determining whether any adjustments are necessary to assist you in performing your role.

If you fail to provide personal information 

If you fail to provide information when requested, which is necessary for us to consider your application (such as evidence of qualifications or work history), we will not be able to process your application successfully. For example, if we require a credit check or references for this role and you fail to provide us with relevant details, we will not be able to take your application further.

How we use particularly sensitive personal information

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

  • We will use information about your disability status to consider whether we need to provide appropriate adjustments during the recruitment process, for example whether adjustments need to be made during a test or interview, or for access to our premises. We will also use it to determine whether any adjustments will be needed to assist you in performing the role.
  • We will use 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.

Information about criminal convictions

We may collect information about your criminal convictions history (conditional on checks and any other conditions, such as references, being satisfactory).  We are entitled to seek information about any criminal record you may have, in order to satisfy ourselves that there is nothing in your criminal convictions history which makes you unsuitable for the role. In particular:

  • If you are applying for a role carrying out residential conveyancing work (whether as a lawyer or support staff), we are required by the Law Society’s Conveyancing Quality Scheme (of which we are an accredited member) to ask for your consent to apply for a basic criminal record check on your behalf.
  • Roles in a solicitors practice require a high degree of trust and integrity since they involve dealing with high value client money as well as confidential and sensitive client information. Therefore we ask for your consent to seek a basic disclosure of your criminal records history on your behalf.

We have in place appropriate safeguards which we are required by law to maintain when processing such data.

Automated decision-making

You will not be subject to decisions that will have a significant impact on you based solely on automated decision-making.

Data sharing

Why might you share my personal information with third parties? 

We will only share your personal information with the search consultancy or recruitment agency which introduced you to us, for the purpose of processing your application, and with third-party providers undertaking criminal records or other background checks on our behalf. 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.

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.

Data retention

How long will you use my information for? 

We will retain your personal information for a period of three months after we have communicated to you our decision about whether to appoint you. We retain your personal information for that period so that we can show, in the event of a legal claim, that we have not discriminated against candidates on prohibited grounds and that we have conducted the recruitment exercise in a fair and transparent way. After this period, we will securely destroy your personal information in accordance with our data retention policy and/or applicable laws and regulations.

If we wish to retain your personal information on file, on the basis that a further opportunity may arise in future and we may wish to consider you for that, we will write to you separately, seeking your explicit consent to retain your personal information for a fixed period on that basis.

Rights of access, correction, erasure, and restriction

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 (see below).
  • 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 law@willans.co.uk in writing.

Right to withdraw consent

When you applied for this role, you consented to us processing your personal information for the purposes of the recruitment exercise. You have the right to withdraw your consent for processing for that purpose at any time. To withdraw your consent, please contact law@willans.co.uk. Once we have received notification that you have withdrawn your consent, we will no longer process your application and, subject to our retention policy, we will dispose of your personal data securely.

Compliance

We have appointed a Compliance Officer for Legal Practice (COLP) 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 COLP at 34 Imperial Square, Cheltenham GL50 1QZ or via law@willans.co.uk. 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.

Changes to this privacy notice

We reserve the right to update this privacy notice at any time.

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