Candidate Privacy Notice

What is the purpose of this document?

Wynne-Jones IP Limited, registered in England and Wales with company number 10797524 and registered office at Southgate House, Southgate Street, Gloucester, GL1 1UB, United Kingdom (‘Wynne-Jones IP’), is a "controller" in relation to personal data. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you. We are required under data protection legislation to notify you of the information contained in this privacy notice.

You are being sent a copy of this privacy notice because you are applying for a job or a student placement with us (whether as an employee, worker, contractor, or student). 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 UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR).

This notice does not form part of any contract of employment or other contract to provide services. We may update this notice at any time.

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 a job or a student placement with us, we will collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you:

• Personal contact details such as name, title, addresses, telephone numbers, personal email addresses, date of birth, gender, employment history and qualifications.
• Any information you provide to us during an interview.
• Recruitment information (including copies of right to work documentation, references and other information included in a CV, cover letter or as part of the application process, including information from LinkedIn or other publicly available sources).
• Result of the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check if conducted.
• Any other information included as part of the application process, such as test results.
• 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 typically collect personal information about employees, workers and contactors through the application and recruitment process, either directly from candidates or sometimes from an employment agency or background check provider. We may sometimes collect additional information from third parties including former employers, credit reference agencies or other background check agencies.

How we will use information about you

We will only use your personal information when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal information in the following circumstances:

• Assess your skills, qualifications, and suitability for the work, role, or placement.
• 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 a role, or give you work or a placement since it would be beneficial to our business to appoint someone to that role, have that work carried out, or have someone on a student placement. Generally, it will also be in your legitimate interests to have the opportunity of employment, engagement, or a work placement with us.

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

Having received your CV and covering letter OR your application for and the results from any test which you have taken, 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, work, or placement. If we decide to offer you the role, work, or placement, we will then take up references AND/OR carry out a criminal record AND/OR carry out ANY OTHER check 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), 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.
• 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 do not envisage that we will process information about criminal convictions for most roles within the company.

However, dependent on the role e.g., Directorship, we will collect information about your criminal convictions history if we would like to offer you the work or role (conditional on checks and any other conditions, such as references, being satisfactory). We may carry out 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:

• The role may be one which is listed on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 (SI 1975/1023) and/or is also specified in the Police Act 1997 (Criminal Records) Regulations (SI 2002/233)] so would be eligible for a standard or enhanced check from the Disclosure and Barring Service.
• Certain roles require a high degree of trust and integrity and so may ask you 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

Automated decision-making takes place when an electronic system uses personal information to make a decision without human intervention. We are allowed to use automated decision-making in the following circumstances:

1. Where we have notified you of the decision and given you 3 days to request a reconsideration.
2. Where it is necessary to perform the contract with you and appropriate measures are in place to safeguard your rights.
3. In limited circumstances, with your explicit written consent and where appropriate measures are in place to safeguard your rights.

If we make an automated decision on the basis of any particularly sensitive personal information, we must have either your explicit written consent or it must be justified in the public interest, and we must also put in place appropriate measures to safeguard your rights.

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 we have notified you.

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: Recruitment Agencies, Gov, HMRC. 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.

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 Fiona Watkins, Data Protection Officer.

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?

For recruitment purposes, we will retain your personal information for a period of 6 months after we have communicated to you our decision about whether to appoint you to the role or provide you with work or a placement. 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 applicable laws and regulations.

If you are successful in securing a position with Wynne-Jones IP Ltd, all employee records will be held for no longer than necessary.

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 Fiona Watkins, HR & Operations Director, in writing.

No fee usually required

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal information (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request for access is clearly unfounded or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with the request in such circumstances.

Right to withdraw consent

In the limited circumstances where you may have provided your consent to the collection, processing, and transfer of your personal information for a specific purpose, you have the right to withdraw your consent for that specific processing at any time. To withdraw your consent, please contact Fiona Watkins, HR & Operations Director (Data Protection Officer). Once we have received notification that you have withdrawn your consent, we will no longer process your information for the purpose or purposes you originally agreed to, unless we have another legitimate basis for doing so in law.

Questions and complaints

The firm’s Data Protection Officer has responsibility for overseeing compliance with this privacy notice. If you have any questions about this privacy notice or how we handle your personal information, please contact the Data Protection Officer. 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, and we will provide you with a new privacy notice when we make any substantial updates. We may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.