Candidate Privacy Notice

What is the purpose of this document? 

Visor Ltd registered in Ireland and AccountsIQ registered in England and Wales (together known as “we”, “our” and “us”, “Controller”, “Company”) are committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected. This privacy notice explains how we process personal data concerning our candidates during our recruitment exercise, how long we will keep your data, and details on your rights related to data processing.   

When we refer to Data Protection Legislation, we mean the EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR), Data Protection Act 2018, United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 and any legislation implemented in connection with this legislation. 

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. 
• 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 

When you apply to 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 the application form and/or pre-screening questions.  
• The information you have provided to us in your curriculum vitae and/or cover letter.  
• Any information you provided in an email, through website, by phone during the recruitment process.  
• Any information you provide us with during an interview.  
• Test scores for those candidates who complete an assessment.  
• Background and reference checks, where applicable. 
• Overall candidate scores for all the personal and professional attributes of a candidate when considering them for the position they are applying for, throughout all interview stages.  

How is your personal information collected? 

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

• You, the candidate 
• The relevant recruitment agency, from which we collect the information you provided on your curriculum vitae as part of the application process with them;
• The relevant recruitment platform such as LinkedIn; 
• Third-party service reports, for example, where an Occupational Health Assessment is required but only once we have discussed this with you. 

How we will use the information about you 

We will use the personal information we collect about you to for the following purposes and based on the following legal bases:  

• Assess your skills, qualifications, and suitability for the role; communicate with you about the recruitment process, based on the necessity to enter into a contract between you and us; 
• Carry out background and reference checks, where applicable based on our legitimate interest in assessing the suitability of the candidate, taking into account the company's vision and objectives, in order to provide a safe place to work and to ensure high quality services to our clients; and/or to comply with any legal obligations requiring criminal record checks for accounting activities or similar positions. 
• Keep records related to our hiring processes, on the basis of our legitimate interest in the proper organisation and management of our human resources activities; 
• Comply with other legal or regulatory requirements. 

We will need to process your personal information to decide whether to enter into a contract of employment with you. However, we are under no obligation to enter into a contract. We will assess each case on its merits, to decide whether to appoint you in the role since it would be beneficial to our business to appoint someone suitable based on the job description and requirements.  

Having received your CV and covering letter we will 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 verify your right to work and take up references if required before confirming your appointment.  

What happens if I don’t provide personal information? 

If you decide not to provide the information 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 details on a certification or references for this role and you do not provide us with relevant details, we will not be able to take your application further.  

How we use particularly sensitive personal information 

We may also process the following special categories of personal data: 

• Diversity and inclusion information including race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity and religion (with your consent only). 

• Information about your health, including any medical condition (only if it is relevant in this framework of the recruitment phase). 
• Information about criminal convictions and offences (if applicable to the job role). 

If you disclose sensitive personal information during the shortlisting or interview process, 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.  
• We will use information about criminal convictions to decide whether to proceed with your application or offer of employment (where applicable to the job role). This information may be required to fulfil regulatory obligations.  

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 currently do not use any third party recruitment platforms or job boards to capture any job candidate data.  
However, we do not exclude that in the future we collaborate with recruitment agencies or use the services of partners, suppliers to support us in the recruitment process, in which case we will disclose only the minimum data necessary and in compliance with the requirements of the applicable legislation in the field of personal data protection. 

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. An overview of security measures can be found here.  

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.  

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.  

How long will you use my information for? 

We will retain your personal information for a period of 6 months for unsuccessful candidates, after we have communicated to you our decision. 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 there is no legitimate interest or legal obligation or other legal basis for keeping the data for a longer period.  

If we wish to retain your personal information on file, on the basis that we may wish to consider you for a future opportunity, we will ask your consent to retain your personal information for a fixed period.   

If your application is successful and you subsequently become employed by us, the information will become part of your personnel file in accordance with the information that will be provided to you as employee, worker, or contractor. If the data you provided to us during the recruitment process is kept in the personnel files, it could be stored for a period of 6 years after the termination of your employment contract. Otherwise, the personal data provided during the recruitment process which is not kept in the personnel file will be stored for maximum 2 years after the termination of the employment. 

Your rights in connection with personal information 

Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to: 

• Request access to your personal data (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 rectification of the personal data that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you corrected. 
• Request erasure of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal data where there is no good reason for us to continue to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal data where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below).  
• Object to processing of your personal data 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 data for direct marketing purposes. 
• Request the restriction of processing of your personal data. 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 portability of your personal data by receiving from us the personal data we hold about you which you have provided to us, in a reasonable format specified by you, including for the purpose of you transmitting that personal data to another data controller (“data portability”) to another party. 

If you want to exercise any of these rights under the applicable data protection legislation (e.g. review, verify, correct, or request erasure of your personal data, 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 Protection Officer (DPO) at privacy@accountsiq.com.  

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. You can find a list of Supervisory Authorities here.   

Data protection officer 

We have appointed a data protection officer (DPO) to oversee compliance with this privacy notice. If you have any questions about this privacy notice or how we manage your personal information, please contact the DPO at privacy@accountsiq.com.