Privacy Policy

Job Applicant Privacy Notice

Data Protection Officer: Mark Willson

Recruitment Manager: Paul Hayler

Contact Details:

Email: information-rights@southeasternrailway.co.uk;

Write to: Human Resources, SE Trains Limited, 2nd Floor, 4 More London, Riverside, London, SE1 2AU (we, our or us).

Introduction

As part of any recruitment process and work experience application, we collect and process information about you, (i.e. your personal data) through our recruitment website. We are committed to being transparent about how we collect and use your personal data and provide you with information as to

how we and why we process your personal data;
how we seek to meet our legal obligations under the Data Protection Act 2018 and General Data Protection Regulation as implemented in the UK (UK GDPR); and
your rights over your personal data and how you can exercise them.

Please read the following privacy notice to understand how we use and protect your personal data.

What personal data do we process?

We will process a range of personal data about you where we consider it is necessary to progress your job/work experience application. This includes the following personal data that would normally be provided by you or by a third party acting on your behalf:

Your name, address and contact details, including email address and telephone number;
Details of your qualifications, skills, experience and employment history;
Information about your current level of remuneration, including benefit entitlements;
Whether or not you have a disability for which we may need to make reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process;
Information about your entitlement to work in the UK; and
Equal opportunities monitoring information, including information about your ethnic origin, sexual orientation, health and religion or belief.

This personal data may be contained in your completed application form or your CV that is uploaded onto our online recruitment system, or it may be provided by you directly to us when you make your application for a job or work experience.

Your personal data may also be obtained from your passport and/or other identity documents or collected through interviews or other forms of assessment including online tests and results from assessment centres.

We may also be provided with your personal data from third parties, such as references supplied by former employers, information from employment background check providers and, where permitted, criminal records checks (see below).

Requests for this personal data will only be made once a job offer has been made and we will remind you that we will be requesting this information when we confirm our job offer.

For work experience applicants that are successful in securing a placement, we may also collect your emergency contact details and medical/health information (only if necessary for your safety and wellbeing during the work experience placement and only when a placement is offered).

Your Personal Data will be stored in a number of our systems, including on your application record, in our HR management systems and on other IT systems (including email).

Why do we process your personal data?

We consider it necessary to process your personal data to allow us to progress your application. under UK GDPR, we are required to have at least one legal basis for processing any personal data. In respect of processing your personal data as part of your job application we may process it on the following grounds:

the processing is necessary to take steps at your request prior to entering into a contract (of employment);
the processing is necessary for our (or a third party’s) legitimate interests; or
your consent.

This includes processing personal data provided by job and work experience applicants to allow us to manage the recruitment process, including assessing and confirming a candidate's suitability for employment and determining to whom a job offer or work experience placement should be made.

We are also legally required to process some personal data to comply with legal obligations imposed on us, for example, it is required to check a successful applicant's eligibility to work in the UK before their employment commences.

We process personal data about the health of candidates so that we can make reasonable adjustments to our recruitment processes to accommodate candidates who have a disability.

We may also retain your personal data processed during the recruitment process, if your application is unsuccessful, for a limited period to allow us to, where necessary, of establishing, exercising or defending legal rights.

Where we collect and process information about your ethnic origin, sexual orientation, health or religion or belief, this is for equal opportunities monitoring purposes (and where we do so, we will always seek to anonymise such information prior to such processing taking place).

For some roles, we are required to seek information about prior unspent (and certain situations spent) criminal convictions and/or to prevent or detect the likelihood of fraud. Where we seek this information, we do so because it is necessary for us to carry out our obligations and exercise specific rights in relation to potential contract of employment, and only where it is legally permitted.

For work experience placements, we will use the personal data collected for the following purposes;

To process and evaluate your work experience application
To communicate with you regarding your application and placement
To ensure your safety, security, and wellbeing during the placement
To comply with legal obligations or regulatory requirements
To improve our work experience programs and evaluate their effectiveness

Who has access to your personal data?

Your personal data will 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 with a vacancy and IT staff, if access to your personal data is necessary for the performance of their roles. It may also be processed by contractors where necessary, acting on our behalf as part of the recruitment process, or where they are providing key services on our behalf. These third parties will only be given access if they are subject to a contract that requires them to adhere to security measures at least as comprehensive as ours, and only where they will process any personal data in the course of their role solely on the basis of our instructions, unless we are legally permitted to do so under the Data Protection Act 2018 and/or UK GDPR.

We will not share your personal data with third parties, unless we have a legal obligation to do so, or your application for employment is successful and we have made you an offer of employment. We will then share your data with former employers to obtain references for you, employment background check providers to obtain necessary background checks and the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) (where applicable) to obtain necessary criminal records checks (and. where we are required to do so, we will obtain your prior consent before doing so – in the context of employment references and employment background check providers, by submitting an application and accepting an offer of employment, you are indicating you consent for such checks and references to be carried out or sought).

We may also share personal data with third parties where it is necessary for any of the purposes set out in this privacy notice.

For work experience placements, we may share your personal data with the following entities, strictly for the purposes mentioned in section ‘why do we process your personal data’:

Southeastern Railway personnel involved in the work experience program
Third-party service providers who assist us in managing and coordinating the work experience placements
Regulatory authorities or law enforcement agencies, as required by applicable laws or regulations

How do we protect your personal data?

We take the security of your personal data seriously. We have implemented internal policies, systems and controls to ensure that your personal data is not lost, accidentally destroyed, misused or disclosed without due authorisation, and is not accessed except by our employees where necessary in the proper performance of their duties.

For how long we retain your personal data?

Application details are anonymised automatically after 12 months from the last date you logged into our careers site, unless deleted earlier at your request. You will have the option of extending this if you choose. We will ask for your consent before we keep your personal data beyond this period and you are free to withdraw your consent at any time by contacting the Recruitment Manager.

If your application for employment is successful, personal data gathered during the recruitment process will be transferred to your personnel file (and retained during the term of your employment). The periods for which your data will be held will be provided to you in a new privacy notice.

Where will your personal data be processed?

Any Personal Data that we process will only be stored in the UK or in a country deemed by the United Kingdom to have adequate data protection laws.

Your rights

You have a number of legal rights in respect of our processing of your personal data, including:

requesting access to and be provided with a copy of your personal data held by us;
requesting that we correct any errors in your personal data or complete any incomplete personal data;
requesting that we delete or stop processing your data, for example where we have no need to further process your personal data;
objecting to our further processing of your data where we are relying on its legitimate interests as the legal ground for processing; and
ask us to stop processing your personal data for a period if data is inaccurate or there is a dispute about whether or not your interests override the Company's legitimate grounds for processing data.

If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact the Data Protection Officer .

We will respond to your request within one calendar month of either your request, or where we reasonably require it, receipt of satisfactory evidence of your identity. In certain situations, we may need to extend this to up to 3 months where your request is complex. if this is the case, we will contact you within the first month to notify you of this, and where possible, the reasons why we are unable to comply with your request within the first month.

We may not be able to comply with your request, either where the right does not apply to the processing activities we are undertaking, or where we reasonably require additional information to allow us to proceed with your request, for example, where we require evidence that the information we hold is inaccurate.

Where we reasonably require additional information from you, the deadline is suspended until we receive this additional information.

If you believe that we have not fully complied with your request to exercise your data protection rights, you can complain to

the Recruitment Manager (whose contact details appear above)
SE Trains Limited’s Data Protection Officer (information-rights@southeasternrailway.co.uk) or
directly to the Information Commissioner, whose contact details can be found at www.ico.org.uk

You also have the right to apply to the court to exercise your rights.

What if you do not provide personal data?

You are under no statutory or contractual obligation to provide your personal data to us during the recruitment process. However, if you do not provide all the required information, we may not be able to process your application or have to revoke any job offer made.