Temporary recruitment agency – privacy notice

As part of any recruitment process, Portsmouth City Council (PCC) Recruitment Agency collects and processes personal data relating to applicants. PCC is committed to being transparent about how it collects and uses that data and to meeting its data protection obligations under the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). This privacy notice tells you about how the Council collects and uses personal information relating to the Recruitment Agency process. The Agency is committed to protecting the privacy of candidate and clients. The information you submit to the Agency is only used for the purposes set out in this notice.

We may collect your personal details, including but not limited to your name and contact details (together with your e-mail address) and other relevant information from your CV. On occasions this may also include sensitive personal information such as details of criminal convictions and ethnic origin.

1. to provide our services to you;
2. to maintain our business relationship, where you are a user of our service;
3. to enable you to submit your CV and application. Please see the separate section on your CV below which outlines additional uses and disclosures;
4. to match your details with job vacancies, to assist us in finding a position that is most suitable for you and to send your personal information to clients in order to apply for jobs;
5. to answer your enquiries;
6. to fulfil contractual obligations with our clients;
7. to trusted third parties where we have retained them to provide services that you or our clients have requested, such as reference, qualification and criminal reference checking services (as required), verification of the details you have provided from third party sources, psychometric evaluations or skills tests. These third parties comply with similar and equally stringent undertakings of privacy and confidentiality as Portsmouth City Council;
8. to third parties who perform functions on our behalf and who also provide services to us, such as professional advisors or IT consultants carrying out testing and development work on our business technology systems. These third parties comply with similar undertakings of privacy and confidentiality as Portsmouth City Council;
9. we may also release personal information to regulatory or law enforcement agencies, if they require us to do so. We will also disclose your information where we are permitted and requested to do so by law
10. the website may also use a website recording service which can record mouse clicks, mouse movements, page scrolling and any text keyed into website forms. Data collected by this service is used to improve our website usability. The information collected is stored and is used for aggregated and statistical reporting, and is not shared with anybody else.
11. Portsmouth City Council is an equal opportunities employer and an organisation committed to diversity. This means that all job applicants will receive equal treatment and that we will not discriminate on grounds of gender, marital status, race, ethnic origin, colour, nationality, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, religion or age.

As part of our commitment to equal opportunities we may from time to time use information provided by you for the purposes of diversity monitoring. All such information will be used on an anonymised basis.

We give you the option of submitting your CV via our website or by providing your CV to a member of our Recruitment Team. You can do this either to apply for a specific advertised job or for consideration by our Recruitment Team for positions as they come up. Your CV will be stored in the agency database, and will be accessible by the Councils Recruitment Team.

You can update your CV at any time, simply by following the same procedure to submit a new CV. Your old CV will automatically be archived providing the submission details remain the same (for example you submit both CVs using the same email address or you advise the relevant contact of your new submission)

Your information may 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.

PCC 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 and the Disclosure and Barring Service to obtain necessary criminal records checks.

PCC will not transfer your data outside the European Economic Area.

PCC 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.

If your application for employment is unsuccessful, PCC will hold your data on file for 6 months after the end of the relevant recruitment process. At the end of that period, 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 for employees.

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

• Access and obtain a copy of your data on request;
• Require PCC to change incorrect or incomplete data;
• Require PCC to delete or stop processing your data, for example where the data is no longer necessary for the purposes of processing; and
• Object to the processing of your data where PCC is relying on its legitimate interests as the legal ground for processing.

If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact

Data Protection Officer
Portsmouth City Council
Civic Offices,
Portsmouth,
PO1 2AL

Email: foi@portsmouthcc.gov.uk, Telephone: 023 9282 2251

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

Information Commissioner’s Office,
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

Tel: 0303 123 1113 (local rate) or 01625 545 745 (if you prefer to use a national rate number).

You are under no statutory or contractual obligation to provide data to PCC Agency. However, if you do not provide the information, PCC Agency will not be able to process your application properly or at all.

Recruitment processes are not based on any automated decision-making.

PCC keeps its privacy notices under regular review. This privacy notice was last updated on 16/05/2018.

Portsmouth City Council is a registered Data Controller, Registration Number Z5578313