Applicant Privacy Policy

For the purposes of this Privacy Policy, our commercial activities and services for individuals and businesses are referred to as ‘Recruitment Services’, and our actual or potential hiring customers are referred to as ‘Clients’.

As you go through our recruitment process, we need to collect and process some personal data about you. If you are not comfortable with us handling your information the way we describe in this policy, just let us know and please do not provide it.  However, if we ask for specific details and you choose not to provide them, it might affect our ability to process your application properly or even at all.

When it comes to equal opportunities monitoring, you are not obligated to share that information and there are no consequences if you decide not to provide it.

Our commitment is to be transparent and to meet all our responsibilities when it comes to protecting your information.

We gather and handle various personal details about you. Personal data is any information that can identify an individual. This covers:
•    Your basic contact info: name, title, address, email, and phone number.
•    Details about your qualifications, skills, work experience, and employment history, including when you started and left previous jobs.
•    Info about your pay, including any benefits like pensions.
•    Details about your right to work in the UK.
•    For equal opportunities monitoring, we may also collect info about your age, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, health, and religion or belief.
•    Information relating to your personal hobbies, interests and pastimes.

We can gather this information in various ways during the application and recruitment process. Here's how:
•    Your details might be in the application forms and CVs you submit.
•    We may get information from your identity documents, like your passport, and collect it during interviews and assessment tests.
•    Sometimes, we also collect info from third parties, like references from your past employers, details from employment background check providers, and data from criminal records checks allowed by law.  Please see section on third party data collection below for more information.

We store all this data in different places, such as your application record in our secure file storage and our email system.

•    To meet legal obligations, such as checking your right to work in the UK before starting employment.
•    We have a legitimate interest in processing data during recruitment to manage the process effectively, evaluate candidates, and make informed decisions about who to hire. This also helps us defend against legal claims.
•    If necessary, we process health information to make reasonable adjustments in the recruitment process for candidates with disabilities.
•    For specific roles, we may conduct criminal records checks to ensure individuals are suitable for particular positions.

As part of our job at Happy Business, we actively search for information to help find the right people for job roles. This might mean gathering data from places like job boards, ads, LinkedIn, or other social media. Some info is publicly available, while other details come from sites or providers we subscribe to. 
If we find that the information from third parties is not useful, we will discard it. However, we might keep a small record to avoid duplicate efforts. If we think the info could be helpful for our recruitment services, we will follow the guidelines in this Policy and the Data Protection Policy.