Privacy Notice

What is the purpose of this document?

Alliantist Limited (trading as “ISMS.online”) is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information.

This privacy notice describes how we collect and use personal information about you during and after your working relationship with us, in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018.

It applies to:

• all candidates applying to work with us; and
• all current and former employees, workers and contractors (referred to in this notice collectively as “staff”).

ISMS.online is a “data controller”. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you. We are required under data protection legislation to notify you of the information contained in this privacy notice.

This notice does not form part of any contract of employment or other contract to provide services. We may update this notice at any time but if we do so, we will provide you with an updated copy of this notice as soon as reasonably practical.

It is important that you read and retain this notice, together with any other privacy notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal information about you, so that you are aware of how and why we are using that information and what your rights are under the data protection legislation.

We may collect, store and use the following categories of personal information about you:

• Personal contact details such as name, title, addresses, telephone numbers and personal email addresses
• Date of birth
• Gender
• Emergency contact information & relationship to candidate/staff
• National Insurance number
• Bank account details, payroll records and tax status information
• Salary, annual leave, pension and benefits information.
• Start date and, if different, the date of your continuous employment
• Leaving date and your reason for leaving
• Location of employment or workplace
• Copy of driving licence or Passport
• Recruitment information (including copies of right to work documentation, references and other information included in a CV or cover letter or as part of the application process)
• Employment records (including job titles, work history, working hours, holidays, training records and professional memberships)
• Compensation history
• Performance, disciplinary and grievance information
• Other information obtained through electronic means such as swipe card records
• Information about your use of our information and communications systems
• Photographs
• Results of HMRC employment status check, details of your interest in and connection with the intermediary through which your services are supplied.

We may also collect, store and use the following more sensitive types of personal information:

• Information about your health, including any medical condition and sickness records, including:
  • details of any absences (other than holidays) from work including time on statutory parental leave and sick leave; and
  • where you leave employment and the reason for leaving is related to your health, information about that condition needed for pensions purposes.
• Information about your race or ethnicity and details of any disability where you choose to provide it for equal opportunities monitoring.
• Information about criminal convictions and offences.

How is your personal information collected?

We collect personal information about employees, workers and contractors through the application and recruitment process, either directly from candidates or sometimes from an employment agency, background check provider or the Disclosure and Barring Service. We may sometimes collect additional information from third parties including referees, former employers, credit reference agencies or other background check agencies.

We may collect additional personal information in the course of job-related activities throughout the period of you working for us.

Situations in which we will use your personal information

Candidates

In the case of candidates, we will use the personal information we collect about you to:

• Assess your skills, qualifications, and suitability for the role.
• Use AI tools to help assess applications. Before we do this, we remove your name and contact details from your CV. Our recruitment team reviews the results and makes all decisions about your application.
• Carry out background and reference checks, where applicable, including a credit check before your employment starts if your role will have access to our production environments.
• Communicate with you about the recruitment process.
• Keep records related to our hiring processes.
• 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. It is also in our legitimate interests to keep our systems and information secure, which is why we carry out credit checks for roles with production access.

We also need to process your personal information to decide whether to enter into a contract with you.

Failure to provide information (such as evidence of qualifications or work history) will mean we will not be able to process your application successfully.

Staff

We need all the categories of information in the list above primarily to allow us to perform our contract with you and to enable us to comply with legal obligations. In some cases we may use your personal information to pursue legitimate interests, provided your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests. Our legitimate interests are managing and planning our business, keeping our systems and information secure, preventing fraud, and understanding staff retention. The situations in which we will process your personal information are listed below.

• Making a decision about your recruitment or appointment.
• Determining the terms on which you work for us.
• Determining whether your engagement is deemed employment for the purposes of Chapter 10 of Part 2 of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003 (ITEPA 2003) and providing you with a status determination statement in accordance with the applicable provisions of ITEPA 2003.
• Checking you are legally entitled to work in the UK.
• Paying you and, if you are an employee or deemed employee for tax purposes, deducting tax and National Insurance contributions (NICs).
• Providing contractual benefits to you:
  • Enrolling you in a pension arrangement in accordance with our statutory automatic enrolment duties.
  • Liaising with the trustees or managers of a pension arrangement operated by us, your pension provider and any other provider of employee benefits.
• Administering the contract we have entered into with you.
• Business management and planning, including accounting and auditing.
• Conducting performance reviews, managing performance and determining performance requirements.
• Making decisions about salary reviews and compensation.
• Assessing qualifications for a particular job or task, including decisions about promotions.
• Gathering evidence for possible grievance or disciplinary hearings.
• Responding to whistleblowing investigations where you report the evidence of whistleblowing using your name (i.e. where the report is not made anonymously)
• Responding to whistleblowing investigations where you are named in the whistleblowing report.
• Making decisions about your continued employment or engagement.
• Making arrangements for the termination of our working relationship.
• Education, training and development requirements.
• Dealing with legal disputes involving you, or other employees, workers and contractors, including accidents at work.
• Ascertaining your fitness to work.
• Managing sickness absence.
• Complying with health and safety obligations.
• To prevent fraud.
• To monitor your use of our information and communication systems to ensure compliance with our IT policies, as explained in our [IT Acceptable Use Policy].
• To ensure network and information security, including preventing unauthorised access to our computer and electronic communications systems and preventing malicious software distribution.
• To conduct data analytics studies to review and better understand employee retention and attrition rates.
• Equal opportunities monitoring.

Some of the above grounds for processing will overlap and there may be several grounds which justify our use of your personal information.

If you fail to provide personal information

If you fail to provide certain information when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract we have entered into with you (such as paying you or providing a benefit), or we may be prevented from complying with our legal obligations (such as to ensure the health and safety of our workers).

Change of purpose

We will only use your personal information for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If we need to use your personal information for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

Please note that we may process your personal information without your knowledge or consent, in compliance with the above rules, where this is required or permitted by law.

Situations in which we will use your sensitive personal information

In general, we will not process particularly sensitive personal information about you unless it is necessary for performing or exercising obligations or rights in connection with employment. On rare occasions, there may be other reasons for processing, such as it is in the public interest to do so. The situations in which we will process your particularly sensitive personal information are listed below.

• We will use information about your physical or mental health, or disability status, to:
  • ensure your health and safety in the workplace;
  • assess your fitness to work;
  • provide appropriate workplace adjustments;
  • monitor and manage sickness absence; and
  • administer benefits including statutory maternity pay, statutory sick pay, and pensions.

  We need to process this information to exercise rights and perform obligations in connection with your employment.

• We will use information about your race or ethnicity and disabilities, where you choose to provide it, to monitor equal opportunities. Providing this information is voluntary.
• If we reasonably believe that you or another person are at risk of harm and the processing is necessary to protect you or them from physical, mental or emotional harm or to protect physical, mental or emotional well-being.

Do we need your consent?

We do not need your consent if we use special categories of your personal information in accordance with our appropriate policy document (as required by the Data Protection Act 2018) to carry out our legal obligations or exercise specific rights in the field of employment law. In limited circumstances, we may approach you for your written consent to allow us to process certain particularly sensitive data. If we do so, we will provide you with full details of the information that we would like and the reason we need it, so that you can carefully consider whether you wish to consent. You should be aware that it is not a condition of your contract with us that you agree to any request for consent from us.

We do not need your consent where the purpose of the processing is to protect you or another person from harm or to protect your well-being and if we reasonably believe that you need care and support, are at risk of harm and are unable to protect yourself.

Information about criminal convictions

We will only collect information about criminal convictions if it is appropriate given the nature of the role and where we are legally able to do so. Where appropriate, we will collect information about criminal convictions as part of the recruitment process or we may be notified of such information directly by you in the course of you working for us.

Data sharing

Why might you share my personal information with third parties?

We will share your personal information with third parties where required by law, where it is necessary to administer the working relationship with you or where we have another legitimate interest in doing so.

Which third-party service providers process my personal information?

Third parties includes third-party service providers (including contractors and designated agents). The following activities are carried out by third-party service providers:

Candidates

Staff

We will share personal data regarding your participation in any pension arrangement operated by us with the trustees or scheme managers of the arrangement in connection with the administration of the arrangements.

How secure is my information with third-party service providers?

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 third-party service providers that process your personal data on our behalf to use it for their own purposes. Some of the organisations listed above, such as job boards, our bank, our pension provider and benefits providers, use your personal data as independent controllers under their own privacy notices. We only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

What about other third parties?

We may share your personal information with other third parties, for example in the context of the possible sale or restructuring of the business. In this situation we will, so far as possible, share anonymised data with the other parties before the transaction completes. Once the transaction is completed, we will share your personal data with the other parties if and to the extent required under the terms of the transaction.

We may also need to share your personal information with a regulator or to otherwise comply with the law. This may include making returns to HMRC, and disclosures to shareholders such as directors’ remuneration reporting requirements.

Transferring information outside the UK

Personal data provided, is primarily handled in the UK. It may also involve transferring your data outside the UK because some of the third parties we use for sub processing have their facilities in other countries. Where your personal data is transferred outside the UK, it will only be transferred to countries that have been identified as providing adequate protection for UK data or to a third party where we have approved transfer mechanisms in place to protect your personal data like the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses with the UK’s International Data Transfer Addendum.

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. Additionally, 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.

Data retention

How long will you use my information for?

We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes for which we collected it, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting or reporting requirements. Details of retention periods for different aspects of your personal information are available in our Data Retention Policy which is available from the Data Protection Lead. If your application is unsuccessful, we will keep your personal information for 6 months after we tell you of our decision, unless you agree to us keeping it for future vacancies.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider:

• The amount, nature and sensitivity of the personal data.
• The potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data.
• The purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means.
• The applicable legal requirements.

In some circumstances, we may anonymise your personal information so that it can no longer be associated with you, in which case we may use that information without further notice to you. Once you are no longer an employee, worker or contractor of the company, we will retain and securely destroy your personal information in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.

Rights of access, correction, erasure and restriction

Your duty to inform us of changes

It is important that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal information changes during your working relationship with us.

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.

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 the Data Protection Lead in writing.

No fee usually required

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal information (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request for access is manifestly unfounded or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with the request in these circumstances.

What we may need from you

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access the information (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is another appropriate security measure to ensure that personal information is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it.

Right to withdraw consent

In the limited circumstances where you may have provided your consent to the collection, processing and transfer of your personal information for a specific purpose, you have the right to withdraw your consent for that specific processing at any time. To withdraw your consent, please contact the Data Protection Lead. Once we have received notification that you have withdrawn your consent, we will no longer process your information for the purpose or purposes you originally agreed to, unless we have another legitimate basis for doing so in law.

Data protection lead

We have appointed a Data Protection Lead 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 them. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information, you can complain to the Data Protection Lead, who will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days, look into it without undue delay and tell you the outcome. You also have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) with respect to data protection issues.

If you have any questions about this privacy notice, please contact the Data Protection Lead: dataprotection@isms.online