Job Applicant Privacy Notice
FORVIS Global Advisory (UK) Ltd. (“FORVIS UK”/”we”/”us”) is a data controller aware of its obligations under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Data Protection Act 2018 and current data protection legislation. We are committed to processing your data securely and transparently. This privacy notice sets out, in line with data protection obligations, the types of data that we collect and hold on you as a job applicant. It also sets out how we use that information, how long we keep it for and other relevant information about your data.
FORVIS UK, whose registered office is 107 Cheapside, London, EC2V 6DN, is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Officer (reference number: ZA730725).
1. Data protection principles
In relation to your personal data, we will:
- Process it fairly, lawfully and in a clear, transparent way.
- Collect your data only for reasons that we find proper for your application and (if your application is successful) in the course of your employment in ways that have been explained to you.
- Only use it in the way that we have told you about.
- Ensure it is correct and up to date.
- Keep your data for only as long as we need it.
- Process it in a way that ensures it will not be used for anything that you are not aware of or have consented to (as appropriate), lost or destroyed.
2. Types of data we processWe may hold many types of data about you, including:
- Your personal details including your name, address, date of birth, email address, phone numbers.
- Gender.
- Information included on your CV and application form including references, education history, qualifications and employment history.
- Any information you provide to us during an interview.
- Documentation relating to your right to work in the UK.
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 (please see below for further information).
3. How we collect your data
We collect data about you in a variety of ways including the information you would normally include in a CV or a job application, or notes made by our recruiting team
during a recruitment interview. Further information will be collected directly from you when your complete forms at the start of your employment, for example,
your bank and next of kin details. Other details may be collected directly from you in the form of official documentation such as your driving license, passport or other right to work evidence.
In some cases, we will collect data about you from third parties, such as employment agencies, former employers when gathering references or credit reference agencies. Personal data is kept in personnel files or within the Company’s HR and IT systems.
4. Why we process your data
The law on data protection allows us to process your data for certain reasons only:
- In order to perform the employment contract that we are party to.
- In order to carry out legally required duties.
- In order for us to carry out our legitimate interests.
- To protect your interests.
- In limited circumstances, with your consent and where something is done in the public interest.
All of the processing carried out by us falls into one of the permitted reasons. Generally, we will rely on the first three reasons set out above to process your data.
We need to collect your data to ensure we are complying with legal requirements such as:
- Carrying out checks in relation to your right to work in the UK.
- Making reasonable adjustments for disabled employees.
We also collect data so that we can carry out activities which are in the legitimate interests of FORVIS UK.
We have set these out below:
- Making decisions about who to offer employment to.
- Making decisions about salary and other benefits.
- Assessing training needs.
- Dealing with legal claims made against us.
If you are unsuccessful in obtaining employment, we will seek your consent to retaining your data in case other suitable job vacancies arise within FORVIS UK for which we think you may wish to apply. You are free to withhold your consent to this and there will be no consequences for withholding consent.
5. Special categories of dataSpecial categories of data are data relating to your:
- Health
- Sex life
- Sexual orientation
- Race
- Ethnic origin
- Political opinion
- Religion
- Trade union membership and
- Genetic and biometric data.
We must process special categories of data in accordance with more stringent guidelines. Most commonly, we will process special categories of data when the following applies:
- You have given explicit consent to the processing.
- We must process the data in order to carry out our legal obligations.
- We must process data for reasons of substantial public interest.
- You have already made the data public.
We will use your special category data:
- For the purposes of equal opportunities monitoring
- Where information is provided 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 do not need your consent if we use special categories of personal data in order to carry out our legal obligations or exercise specific rights under employment law. However, we may ask for your consent to allow us to process certain particularly sensitive data. If this occurs, you will be made fully aware of the reasons for the processing. As with all cases of seeking consent from you, you will have full control over your decision to give or withhold consent and there will be no consequences where consent is withheld. Consent, once given, may be withdrawn at any time. There will be no consequences where consent is withdrawn.
6. Criminal Conviction DataWe may only use information relating to criminal convictions where the law allows us, and we have a legitimate reason, to do so. For some roles there is a regulatory requirement or expectation that criminal record checks will be conducted, and for all roles appropriate checks are considered necessary to protect our business and its systems and to ensure we maintain the trust of clients. It is also a requirement of some of our clients. Our legitimate interests are pursued by ensuring that, as far as practicable, we have trustworthy staff who can be relied up on to operate within the law and the checks are necessary to enable us to perform or exercise our employment law rights and obligations. In all cases we will ask you to authorise our third party screening provider to obtain a basic criminal record disclosure from the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) as part of our background screening checks. Our Basic Checks will not include in any criminal record disclosures information on spent convictions. For regulated professions (including accountants), a Standard Check may be required, which will reveal details of convictions (both spent and unspent), cautions (both spent and unspent) and police reprimands and warnings. This data will usually be collected at the recruitment stage, however, may also be collected during your employment should you be successful in obtaining employment.
7. Automated Decision-Making
You will not be subject to decisions that will have a significant impact on you based solely on automated decision-making.
8. If you do not provide your data to us
One of the reasons for processing your data is to allow us to carry out an effective recruitment process. Whilst you are under no obligation to provide us with your data, we may not able to process, or continue with (as appropriate), your application.
9. Sharing your data
Your data will be shared with colleagues within FORVIS UK where it is necessary for them to undertake their duties with regard to recruitment. This includes, for example, the HR department, those in the department where the vacancy is who responsible for screening your application and interviewing you, the IT department where you require access to our systems to undertake any assessments requiring IT equipment. In some cases, we will collect data about you from third parties, such as employment agencies. Your data will be shared with third parties if you are successful in your job application. In these circumstances, we will share your data in order to:
- Obtain employment references as part of the recruitment process.
- Obtain a criminal records check.
- Obtain financial credit check.
- Obtain right to work check in the UK.
We share your data with bodies outside of the European Economic Area. These countries are the US and the reason for sharing with these countries is the USA is FORVIS UK’s Head Office location. We have put the following measures in place to ensure that your data is transferred securely and that the bodies who receive the data that we have transferred process it in a way required by EU and UK data protection laws:
- FORVIS UK has an intra-group data transfer agreement in place which regulates cross-border transfers of your personal information within the group. FORVIS UK is also self-certified for data transfers from the EU to the US under the EU-US Privacy Shield.
10. Protecting your data
We are aware of the requirement to ensure your data is protected against accidental loss or disclosure, destruction and abuse. 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. Where we share your data with third parties, we provide written instructions to them to ensure that your data are held securely and in line with data protection requirements. Third parties must implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure the security of your data.
11. How long we keep your data for
In line with the data protection principles, we only keep your data for as long as we need it for and this will depend on whether or not you are successful in obtaining employment with us. If your application is not successful and we have not sought consent or you have not provided consent upon our request to keep your data for the purpose of future suitable job vacancies, we will keep your data for six months once the recruitment exercise end 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 manner. If we have sought your consent to keep your data on file for future job vacancies, and you have provided consent, we will keep your data for 12 months once the recruitment exercise ends. At the end of this period, we will delete or destroy your data, unless you have already withdrawn your consent to our processing of your data in which case it will be deleted or destroyed upon your withdrawal of consent. If your application is successful, your data will be kept and transferred to the systems we administer for employees. We have a separate privacy notice for employees, which will be provided to you.
12. Your rights in relation to your data
The law on data protection gives you certain rights in relation to the data we
hold on you. These are:
- The right to be informed. This means that we must tell you how we use your data, and this is the purpose of this privacy notice.
- The right of access. You have the right to access the data that we hold on you. To do so, you should make a subject access request.
- The right for any inaccuracies to be corrected. If any data that we hold about you is incomplete or inaccurate, you are able to require us to correct it.
- The right to have information deleted. If you would like us to stop processing your data, you have the right to ask us to delete it from our systems where you believe there is no reason for us to continue processing 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)
- The right to restrict the processing of the data. For example, if you believe the data we hold is incorrect, we will stop processing the data (whilst still holding it) until we have ensured that the data is correct.
- The right to portability. You may transfer the data that we hold on you for your own purposes.
- The right to object to the inclusion of any information. You have the right to object to the way we use your data where we are using it for our (or a third party’s) legitimate interests. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.
- The right to regulate any automated decision-making and profiling of personal data. You have a right not to be subject to automated decision making in way that adversely affects your legal rights.
Where you have provided consent to our use of your data, you also have the unrestricted right to withdraw that consent at any time. Withdrawing your consent means that we will stop processing the data that you had previously given us consent to use. There will be no consequences for withdrawing your consent. However, in some cases, we may continue to use the data where so permitted by having a legitimate reason for doing so. If you wish to exercise any of the rights explained above, please contact the recruitment team in the first instance, who will refer to the Director of IT Risk and Compliance.
13. Data Privacy Manager
While we are not obliged to appoint a Data Protection Officer, we have appointed a data privacy manager to oversee compliance with this privacy notice. This is the Director of IT Risk and Compliance. If you have any questions about this privacy notice or how we handle your personal information, please contact the data privacy manager at Andrew.Thayil@forvis.com.
14. Making a complaint
The supervisory authority in the UK for data protection matters is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). If you think your data protection rights have been breached in any way by us, you are able to make a complaint to the ICO.
You must indicate that you have read the privacy notice and consent to the processing of your personal data before you can continue.