Job applicant Privacy Notice

Your Personal Data - Who we are

We are Preston City Council and your privacy is important to us. We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation.

If you have any concerns about how the Council is handling your personal data, these can be raised with the Council's Data Protection Officer:

Preston City Council

Lancaster Road

Preston

PR1 2RL

Email: info@preston.gov.uk

We keep our privacy notice under regular review and we will place an updated version on this page.

This will help ensure that you are always aware of what information we collect and how we use it.

What we need

The Council needs to collect and process personal information/data relating to job applicants as part of its recruitment process which may include:

• Your name, address and contact details including telephone/mobile number(s) and personal email address
• Your national insurance number
• Details of your education and qualifications
• Details of your training and skills
• Details of your present and previous employment history and experience.
• Information about your level(s) of remuneration
• Details of and information from referees
• Whether or not you have a disability for which the Council needs to make reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process
• Relationship to an existing Councillor or Council Officer
• Information about your entitlement to work in the UK

The Council may also collect, use and process the following special categories of your personal information:

• Information about your ethnic origin, gender and disability
• Information about current criminal convictions

Why we need it

The Council has a legitimate interest in processing personal data during the recruitment process and for keeping records of the process.

Processing data from job applicants allows the Council to manage the recruitment process, assess and confirm a candidate's suitability for employment and decide to whom to offer a job.

The Council may also need to process data from job applicants to respond to and defend against legal claims.

The Council may need to process data to ensure that it is complying with its legal obligations, for example, to check a successful applicant's eligibility to work in the UK before employment starts. Where the Council processes other special categories of personal information i.e. information about your ethnic, gender or disability, it is for the purposes of equal opportunities monitoring and in line with our data protection policy.

It helps the Council to ensure that its recruitment and selection procedures afford fair and unbiased treatment to all applicants. Personal information used for these purposes is either anonymized or is collected with your explicit consent which can be withdrawn at any time.

During the recruitment process, the Council may also collect personal data about you from third parties, such as references supplied by a former employer. We will seek information from third parties before a job offer is made.

What we do with it

Your personal information will be treated as confidential but it may be shared with other Council services in order to ensure our records are accurate and up-to-date, and to improve the standard of the services we deliver.

We will only use your information in ways which are permitted by the General Data Protection Regulation and the current UK Data Protection law.

We have Data protection and freedom of information in place to oversee the effective and secure processing of your personal data. 

This authority has a duty to protect the public funds it administers, and may use information held about you for all lawful purposes, including but not limited to the prevention and detection of crime including fraud and money laundering.

The Council may also use your information for the purpose of performing any of its statutory enforcement duties. It will make any disclosures required by law and may also share your information with other bodies responsible for detecting/preventing crime including fraud or auditing/administering public funds.

There is also information about your computer hardware and software that is automatically collected by Preston City Council. This information can include:

• your IP address
• browser type
• domain names
• access times
• referring Web site addresses.

This information is used by Preston City Council for the operation of the service, to maintain quality of the service, and to provide general statistics regarding use of the Preston City Council Web site.

Your information may be shared internally for the purposes of the recruitment exercise. This includes members of the HR and recruitment team, interviewers involved in the recruitment process, managers in the business area where the vacancy exists.

The Council may share your information with third parties as specified by you to obtain references. If your application for employment is successful, the Council may share your personal information with third parties, for example, to carry out a DBS criminal record check if required for the job.

Much of the information the Council collects will have been provided by you but some will come from other external sources such as referees. The Council will collect this information in a variety of ways, for example, application forms, CVs or resumes, obtained from your passport or other identity documents or collected through interviews or other forms of assessment.

The data collected may be stored in a range of different places and formats including on your application record, in recruitment management systems and on other IT systems.

We will not disclose your personal information to third parties for marketing purposes

What are your rights

You have the right to:

• request a copy of your information (known as a subject access request)
• request rectification or erasure of your information,
• request a restriction on the processing of your information, and,
• object to processing of your information,
• complain to the Information Commissioner's Office about the way the Council processes your information.
• set your browser to remove or reject cookies before using Preston City Council website 

If you require further information about the use of your data or would like to exercise any of the above rights, please contact:

Data Protection Officer
Preston City Council
Town Hall
Lancaster Road
Preston
PR1 2RL

Transferring information overseas

In certain circumstances we may transfer your information to organisations in other countries on the basis that anyone to whom we pass it protects it in the same way we would and in accordance with applicable laws.

How long we keep your information

We will keep you information for as long as it is required by us or other regulatory bodies in order to comply with legal and regulatory requirements or for other operational reasons. In most cases this will be a minimum of six years.

More information on our retention schedule can be found online.

Website information

Preston City Council encourages you to review the privacy statements of Web sites you choose to link to from Preston City Council so that you can understand how those Web sites collect, use and share your information.

Preston City Council is not responsible for the privacy statements or other content on Web sites outside of the Preston City Council family of Web sites.

Use of Cookies

The Preston City Council Web site use "cookies" to help you personalise your online experience.

A cookie is a text file that is placed on your hard disk by a Website via your web browser. Cookies cannot be used to run programs or deliver viruses to your computer. Cookies are uniquely assigned to you, and can only be read by a web server in the domain that issued the cookie to you.

For more information please refer to our Cookies page.