PRIVACY NOTICE TO CANDIDATES

What is the purpose of this document?

Myerson Solicitors LLP (also referred to as ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’) is 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.

This privacy notice 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 Regulation, as retained in the UK (UK 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

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 CV and covering letter, including your picture where you have added one to your CV.

• The information you have provided when communicating with us, such as name, title, address, telephone number, personal email address, date of birth, gender, employment history, qualifications.

• Any information you provide to us during an interview.

• Any information you provide to us for the purposes of pre-employment checks, such as copies of right to work information, NI number, previous names, nationality, and employment history.
• Any information which you provide when using our on-line application services or chat functions;
• Any publicly available information that is provided to us by third party sources such as Facebook and Linkedin.

In addition, 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 collect personal information about candidates from the following sources:

• You, the candidate when we have direct interactions with you, including where you interact with and/or upload information to our recruitment portal or otherwise interact with our recruitment portal including your Facebook or Linkedin account.

• Where applicable, a recruitment agency or search provider.

• Disclosure and Barring Service in respect of criminal convictions.

• Your named referees (including previous employers, education or training providers).
• Other publicly available third-party sources such as Facebook and Linkedin, which may be undertaken manually by our employees or automatically via our recruitment portal.

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.

• Communicate with you about the recruitment process.

• Keep records related to our hiring processes.

• Comply with legal or regulatory requirements.

Generally, we will use the personal data we have collected about you for the purpose of managing our recruitment process and it is in our legitimate interests to process personal data about you in order to decide whether to appoint you to the vacancy or opportunity that you have applied for. If your application is successful, we will also process your personal information for the purposes of entering into a contract of employment (or other contractual arrangement). We may occasionally need to process your personal data for other reasons including to comply with our legal obligations or where you have provided your consent to us for us to process your personal data for a particular purpose. Please note that if you connect or interact with us via your Facebook or Linkedin account we will collect publicly available information about you. If you do not wish for us to collect such information from such sources, please do not interact with our recruitment portal using such accounts.

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 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 follow up references before confirming your appointment.

We may use annonmised data (i.e. data that does not identify you) for market research and statistical analysis. We do not class such data, provided it does not identify you, as personal data.

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 to any stages of the recruitment process.

• 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 generally collect data about criminal convictions.

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:

• The role of Accounts and Finance requires a high degree of trust and integrity since it involves dealing with high value client money and so we 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.

Disclosure of your personal data

We may share your personal data with the following third parties:

Service providers

TeamTailor who act as our processor and provide candidate tracking software and services to us to help us tack and monitor candidate applications.

Other services providers acting as processors who provide IT services and system administration services.

Professional advisors

Our professional advisors may act as processors or controllers and will include our accountants, auditors and insurers who provide banking, insurance and accounting services, and may need to process your personal data to provide such services to us.

HM Revenue & Customs, regulators and other authorities

We may be required to such entities with personal data and they may act as processors or controllers as part of our reporting activities or to comply with legal requirements.

Other third parties

Such third parties whom we may choose to sell, transfer, or merge parts of our business or our assets. Alternatively, we may seek to acquire other businesses or merge with them. If a change happens to our business, then the new owners may use your personal data in the same way as set out in this privacy notice.

We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. Such third parties can only process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

Some third parties may be based outside of the UK, therefore your personal data may be transferred outside of the UK. Whenever we transfer your personal data out of the UK, we ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to it by ensuring at least one of the following safeguards is implemented:

• we will only transfer personal data to countries that have been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for personal data; and/or
• we use specific contracts which give personal data the same protection it has in the UK with our services providers.

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 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.

How long will you use my information for?

We will retain your personal information for a period of 24 months (or longer, where you have provided your consent confirming you are happy for us to do so) after we have communicated to you our decision about whether to appoint you to the role you applied for. 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.

Please note that if your application is successful we will process your personal data in accordance with our employee privacy notice.

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.
• Withdraw your consent to the processing of your personal data. You can withdraw your consent at any time (where we are relying on consent to process your personal data). This does not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent.

If you wish to exercise any of your rights, please contact DPM (see below for contact details). You will not have to pay a fee to exercise any of your rights unless your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. In which case, we may charge a reasonable fee for this information or refuse to comply with your request.

We aim to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.

Cookies

Where you use our recruitment portal information about your usage may be stored as cookies. Cookies are passive text files that are stored in the internet browser on your device, such as computer, mobile phone or tablet, when using our recruitment portal. We use cookies to improve your usage of our recruitment portal and to gather information about, for example, statistics about the usage of our recruitment portal. This is done to secure, maintain and improve our recruitment portal. The information that is collected through the cookies can in some instances be personal data and is, in such instances, regulated by our Cookie Policy.

You can at any time disable the use of cookies by changing your local settings in your devices. Disabling of cookies can affect the experience of our recruitment portal , for example disabling some functions in our recruitment portal.

Changes

We may change this Privacy Notice from time to time by updating this page. Please check it regularly to ensure you are aware of any changes.

It is important that the data we hold about you is accurate and current, therefore please keep us informed of any changes to your personal data.

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 the data protection manager.

DPM Contact Details:

Carla Murray, Partner Myerson Solicitors LLP Grosvenor House

20 Barrington Road

Altrincham Cheshire WA14 1HB

You also 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 questions about this Privacy Notice, please contact our DPM.

This Privacy Notice has been issued by: Myerson Solicitors LLP

Grosvenor House

20 Barrington Roa

Altrincham

WA14 1HB