&Open Candidate Privacy Notice

Candidate Privacy notice

Policy Owner: Head of Legal

Effective Date: 17 May 2024

1. Purpose

&Open Gifts Limited (“&Open"we," or "us") are "controller" in relation to your personal data. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal data 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 required under data protection laws.

2. 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.

3. 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.
  • The information you have provided in our application process including name, title, address, telephone number, personal email address, date of birth, gender, employment history, qualifications.
  • Any information you provide to us during an interview or testing process, if applicable.
  • We may also collect, store and use the following types of more sensitive personal information:

— documentation such as work permits, details of residency, proof of citizenship; and

— information about your health, including any medical condition.

4. How is your personal information collected?

We collect personal information about candidates from the following sources:

  • You, the candidate.
  • If applicable for your role, any recruitment agency with which you may be registered·
  • Your named referees.
  • From a publicly accessible source such as LinkedIn: identity and contact information, information made available in your profile relating to your skills and qualifications.

5. 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 reference checks, where permitted under local laws.
  • Communicate with you about the recruitment process.
  • Keep records related to our hiring processes.
  • Comply with legal or regulatory requirements.

We will only use your personal information where the law allows. Most commonly we will use your personal information to:

  • Perform the contract we have entered into with you.
  • Enable us to comply with our legal obligations.
  • Pursue our legitimate interests, provided your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests, e.g. to decide whether to appoint you to a role would be in &Open’s legitimate interest, as it would be beneficial to our business to appoint someone to that role.

Having received your application, 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 to decide whether to offer you the role. If we decide to offer you the role, we will then take up references before confirming your appointment

6. 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 references for this role and you fail to provide us with relevant details, we will not be able to take your application further.

7. How we use particularly sensitive personal information

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

  • Documentation such as work permits, details of residency, proof of citizenship will be processed to assess and review eligibility to work for &Open; and
  • Information about your health, including any medical condition, health and sickness records to comply with laws and make reasonable adjustments or accommodations or deal with complaints in this regard.

If you are offered and accept employment the information collected during the recruitment process will become part of your employee record.

8. Information about criminal convictions

We would only use information relating to criminal convictions where the law allows us to do so. We currently do not process information about criminal convictions.

9. Automated decision-making

In compliance with data protection laws, 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 have notified you).

10. Data sharing

Why might you share my personal information with third parties?

We will only share your personal information with the following third parties for the purposes of processing your application, e.g. our HR management IT system which is provided by a third party provider. 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.

11. 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.

12. Data retention

How long will you use my information for?

We will retain your personal information for a period of 12 months after we have communicated to you our decision about whether to appoint you to the role. 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 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.

13. 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 the data protection team on dataprotection@andopen.co.

Right to withdraw consent

In limited circumstances where you have provided consent to the collection, processing and transfer or your personal information, you have the right to withdraw your consent for processing for that purpose at any time. To withdraw your consent, please contact the data protection team on dataprotection@andopen.co. 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.

14. Data protection team

Our Head of Legal oversees compliance with this Privacy Notice. If you have any questions about this Privacy Notice or how we handle your personal data, or would like to make a data subject rights request, please contact the Head of Legal via dataprotection@andopen.co

If you are unsatisfied with our response to any issues that you raise, you may have the right to make a complaint with the data protection authority in your jurisdiction by contacting the data protection authority.

15. Contact Us

If you have any questions about our processing of your personal data or would like to make an access or other request, please contact us at: dataprotection@andopen.co

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