Candidate privacy notice

I.Q. Endoscopes Ltd (we, us, our) 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. 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 that must be provided under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (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.

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

you, the candidate;
recruitment agency;
your named referees;
publicly accessible source such as LinkedIn and Companies House.

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:

Information you have provided to us directly in your application, including your cv, cover letter, name, address, telephone number, personal email address, education history, qualifications and employment history;
Information you provide to us during any interview process;
Information obtained from sources other than yourself previously referred to in this notice.

This may involve us collecting, storing and using the following types of more sensitive personal information:

Information about your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, sexual orientation and political opinions.
Information about your health, including any medical condition, health and sickness records.

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; and
comply with legal or regulatory requirements.

It is in our legitimate interests to decide whether to appoint you to the role since it would be beneficial to our business to appoint someone to that role. We also need to process your personal information to decide whether to enter into a contract of employment with you.

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. References are an important part of our recruitment process and offers of employment are conditional upon us receiving satisfactory references. However, references will only be taken from referees provided to us by you, and following you provided consent to us for us to contact referees.

If you fail to provide personal information

If, when requested, you fail to provide information, which is necessary for us to consider your application, we will not be able to process your application successfully.

How we use sensitive personal information

Where appropriate, we will use your particularly sensitive personal information in the following ways:

We use information about disability 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 use information about racial or ethnic origin, religious or philosophical beliefs, disability or sexual orientation to ensure meaningful equal opportunity monitoring and reporting.

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

We will only share your personal information with our IT system providers for the purposes of processing your application.

All our third-party service providers 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 officer: Tom Kahan tomkahan@iqendoscopes.co.uk.

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

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, unless you have expressly agreed for us to retain your personal information for longer, for the purpose of considering future opportunities with us.

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 protection policy and any applicable laws and regulations.

If we would like to retain your personal information on file, on the basis that we might be able to consider you for an opportunity that may arise in future, we will write to you separately, seeking your explicit consent to retain your personal information for a fixed period for that purpose.

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 making 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 rectification 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 data privacy manager.

Questions or complaints

If you have any questions or concerns about this privacy notice or how we handle your personal information, please contact our data privacy manager.

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) who is responsible for data protection issues in the UK. However, we would appreciate an opportunity to resolve the issue with you directly first.