Candidate Privacy Notice

CANDIDATE PRIVACY NOTICE

As a candidate you are requested to please carefully read this Candidate Privacy Notice

What is the purpose of this document?

Phillips Solicitors Limited is a “data controller”. 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, agent, apprentice, contractor or for work experience). 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 Regulations (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

We may collect personal information about candidates from the following sources:

  • You, the candidate.
  • Recruitment agencies, from which we may collect any of the data listed above.
  • Disclosure and Barring Service in respect of criminal convictions.
  • Your named referees, from whom we collect the following categories of data: ‘Employment history including dates of employment, job title, experience and roles undertaken.
  • For legal executive and solicitor roles with third party professional bodies such as CILEX or the Solicitors Regulatory Authority.

How is your personal information collected?

We may collect personal information about candidates from the following sources:

  • You, the candidate.
  • Recruitment agencies, from which we may collect any of the data listed above.
  • Disclosure and Barring Service in respect of criminal convictions.
  • Your named referees, from whom we collect the following categories of data: ‘Employment history including dates of employment, job title, experience and roles undertaken.
  • For legal executive and solicitor roles with third party professional bodies such as CILEX or the Solicitors Regulatory Authority.

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.
  • Check that you have the right to work in the United Kingdom.
  • 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 assess your suitability for a role within our business and to decide whether it is in the beneficial interests of our business to appoint you to the specific role.

We also need to process your personal information to decide whether to enter into a contract of employment or contract for services or training contract or apprenticeship agreement with you.

Having received your CV and covering letter or completed 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 and/or carry out a criminal record check, ask for evidence of your right to work in the United Kingdom and request evidence of your qualifications before confirming your appointment.

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 or right to work in the United Kingdom), we will not be able to process your application successfully. For example, if we require a reference or evidence of qualifications 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 an interview to accommodate you in the role.
  • We will use information about your race or national or ethnic origin, religious, philosophical or moral beliefs, or your marital status or sexual orientation, to ensure meaningful equal opportunity monitoring and reporting.

Information about criminal convictions

We envisage that we will process information about criminal convictions only in respect of specific roles within the business where this is required.

We will collect information about your criminal convictions history if we would like to offer you a role (conditional on checks and any other conditions, such as references, being satisfactory). We are entitled to carry out a criminal records check in order to satisfy ourselves that there is nothing in your criminal convictions history which makes you unsuitable for the role. In particular:

  • We are required by certain regulatory bodies and panels to carry out criminal record checks for those solicitors and legal executives carrying out fee earning roles within the business.
  • The role of director, solicitor, legal executive, and any other role dealing with property work or where a high degree of trust and integrity is required since it involves dealing with large volumes of client money where it is appropriate for us to seek a basic disclosure of your criminal records history.

We have in place an appropriate policy document and 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 following third parties for the purposes of processing your application: for example an employment agency or consultancy, third-party service providers and other person within our business all of which 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. Details of these measures may be obtained from our Data Protection Manager.

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 on your personnel file if you are appointed to the role. If your application is unsuccessful then 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 our data retention policy.

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 our Finance & Operations Manager in writing.

Right to withdraw consent

When you applied for this role, you provided consent 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 our Finance & Operations Manager. 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.

Data protection manager

We have appointed a Data Protection Manager 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 our Data Protection Manager. 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 if you have any concerns.