Candidate Privacy Policy

What information does Bridge Partners collect?

Bridge Partners collects a range of information about you. This includes:

• Your name, address and 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;
• Whether or not you have a disability for which the organisation needs to make reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process;
• Information about your entitlement to work in the UK; and
• Equal opportunities monitoring information, including information about your ethnic origin, sexual orientation, health, and religion or belief.

Bridge Partners collects this information in a variety of ways. For example, data might be contained in application forms, CVs or resumes, obtained from your passport or other identity documents, or collected through interviews or other forms of assessment.

Bridge Partners will also collect personal data about you from third parties, such as references supplied by former employers, information from employment background check providers. The organisation will seek information from third parties only once a job offer to you has been made and will inform you that it is doing so.

Data will be stored in a range of different places, including on your application record, in HR management systems and on other IT systems (including email).

Why does Bridge Partners process personal data?

Bridge Partners needs to process data to take steps at your request prior to entering into a contract with you. It also needs to process your data to enter into a contract with you.

In some cases, Bridge Partners needs to process data to ensure that it is complying with its legal obligations. For example, it is required to check a successful applicant’s eligibility to work in the UK before employment starts.

Bridge Partners has a legitimate interest in processing personal data during the recruitment process and for keeping records of the process. Processing data from job applicants allows the organisation to manage the recruitment process, assess and confirm a candidate’s suitability for employment and decide to whom to offer a job. Bridge Partners may also need to process data from job applicants to respond to and defend against legal claims.

Where Bridge Partners relies on legitimate interests as a reason for processing data, it has considered whether or not those interests are overridden by the rights and freedoms of employees or workers and has concluded that they are not.

Bridge Partners processes health information if it needs to make reasonable adjustments to the recruitment process for candidates who have a disability. This is to carry out its obligations and exercise specific rights in relation to employment.

Where Bridge Partners processes other special categories of data, such as information about ethnic origin, sexual orientation, health or religion or belief, this is for equal opportunities monitoring purposes.

For some roles, Bridge Partners is obliged to seek information about criminal convictions and offences. Where the organisation seeks this information, it does so because it is necessary for it to carry out its obligations and exercise specific rights in relation to employment.

Bridge Partners will not use your data for any purpose other than the recruitment exercise for which you have applied.

Who has access to data?

Your information will be shared internally for the purposes of the recruitment exercise. This includes members of the HR and recruitment 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.

Bridge Partners will not share your data with third parties, unless your application for employment is successful and it makes you an offer of employment. The organisation will then share your data with former employers to obtain references for you, employment background check providers to obtain necessary background checks.

Bridge Partners will not transfer your data outside the European Economic Area.

How does Bridge Partners protect data?

Bridge Partners takes the security of your data seriously. It has internal policies and controls in place to ensure that your data is not lost, accidentally destroyed, misused or disclosed, and is not accessed except by our employees in the proper performance of their duties.

For how long does Bridge Partners keep data?

If your application for employment is unsuccessful, Bridge Partners will hold your data on file for 12 months after the end of the relevant recruitment process. At the end of that period, your data is deleted or destroyed.

If your application for employment is successful, personal data gathered during the recruitment process will be transferred to your personnel file and retained during your employment. The periods for which your data will be held will be provided to you in a new privacy notice.

Your rights

As a data subject, you have a number of rights. You can:

• Access and obtain a copy of your data on request;
• Require the organisation to change incorrect or incomplete data;
• Require the organisation to delete or stop processing your data, for example where the data is no longer necessary for the purposes of processing;
• Object to the processing of your data where the organisation is relying on its legitimate interests as the legal ground for processing; and
• Ask the organisation to stop processing data for a period if data is inaccurate or there is a dispute about whether or not your interests override the organisation’s legitimate grounds for processing data.

If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact our Data Protection Representative; Alastair Mundell via info@bridgepartners.co.uk.

If you believe that Bridge Partners has not complied with your data protection rights, you can complain to the Information Commissioner.

What if you do not provide personal data?

You are under no statutory or contractual obligation to provide data to Bridge Partners during the recruitment process. However, if you do not provide the information, Bridge Partners may not be able to process your application properly or at all.

You are under no obligation to provide information for equal opportunities monitoring purposes and there are no consequences for your application if you choose not to provide such information.

Automated decision-making

Bridge Partners recruitment processes are not based solely on automated decision-making.

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