Recruitment Privacy Policy

Secret Linen Store is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information.

What does this Notice cover?

This privacy notice illustrates how we collect and use personal information about you during the recruitment process, in line with UK 2021 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It applies to all candidates and explains your rights. In so doing, the Company acts as a Data Controller.

This Privacy Notice is for information only; it is not a contractual agreement.

What is Personal Data?

Personal data is any information about you that enables you to be identified. Personal data covers obvious information such as your name and contact details, but it also covers less obvious information as such employment history, qualifications, training records and right to work eligibility. This list is not exhaustive.

The personal data that we use at Secret Linen Store is set out below.

What information do we collect?

When you apply to work with us, we may collect, store, and use the following types of personal information about you:

  • Any Information on CV and covering letter/email;
  • Any information submitted via our website or through Indeed;
  • Any information you provide to us during an interview;
  • Any information you provide in relation to your right to work documentation.

We may also collect, store, and use the following “special categories” of more sensitive personal information:

  • Information about your race or ethnicity, religious beliefs or sexual orientation;
  • Information about your health, including any medical condition or health and sickness records.

We collect this personal information from the following sources:

  • You, the candidate;
  • Recommendations from your colleagues, friends and/or family;
  • Your named referees; and
  • Data from third-party publicly available sources, such as job boards and LinkedIn.

Why do we process personal data?

We have a legitimate interest in processing personal data during the recruitment process and to keep records of the process.

  • Processing data from you allows us to manage the recruitment process and decide if you are the right person for us.
  • We process health information if we need to make reasonable adjustments to the recruitment process for you. This is to carry out our obligations and exercise specific rights in relation to employment.
  • We want to do everything legally so we may need to process your data to carry out a right-to-work check before your start with us.
  • Where we process other special categories of data, such as information about ethnic origin, sexual orientation, health or religion or belief, this is for equal opportunities monitoring purposes.

We will not use your data for any purpose other than the recruitment exercise for which you have applied.

Who has access to data?

Your information will be shared internally for the purposes of the recruitment exercise. This includes members of the People Happiness (HR) Team, interviewers involved in the recruitment process, managers in the business area with a vacancy and IT employees if access to the data is necessary for the performance of their roles.

We will not share your data with third parties unless your employment application is successful, and we make you an offer of employment. We may share your data with your former employers to obtain references concerning you for us, our employment background check provider such as GOV UK to obtain necessary background checks and an outside payroll company who give us a helping hand with Payroll.

All our third-party service providers are required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal information in line with our policies.

How do we protect data?

We take the security of your data very seriously. We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used, or accessed in an unauthorised way.

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 do we keep data?

If we decide you are not the right fit for us, we may hold your data on file for 6 months after the recruitment process has concluded. After this period, we will securely dispose of your personal information in line with our data retention policy.

If we wish to retain your information on file should there be a basis that a further opportunity may arise in future and we may wish to consider you for that, we will write to you separately seeking your consent to retain your personal information for a fixed period on that basis.

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

Your rights

As a data subject, you have several rights which we will always work to uphold. These include the right to:

  • Be informed about our collection and use of your personal data;
  • Access and obtain a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
  • Require us to change incorrect or incomplete data;
  • Require us to delete or stop processing your data;
  • Restrict the processing of your personal data;
  • Object to us using our personal data for a particular purpose;
  • Withdraw your consent at any time;
  • Ask us to stop processing data for a period if data is inaccurate or there is a dispute about whether or not your interests override our legitimate grounds for processing data.

What if you do not provide personal data?

You are under no statutory or contractual obligation to provide data to us during the recruitment process. However, please be mindful that if you are not able to share this information with us, we may not be able to access your suitability for our vacant positions and we may not be able to process your application properly or at all.

How do I contact you?

To contact us about anything to do with your personal data and data protection, including submitting a subject access request, Danny Mears, Operations Director would be delighted to help you. He can be contacted on:

  • Email address: danny@secretlinenstore.com
  • Postal Address: Secret Linen Store, 5 Durban Road Business Centre, Durban Road, Bognor Regis, West Sussex, PO22 9FE.

Changes to this Privacy Notice

We reserve the right to update this privacy notice at any time. This Privacy Notice was last updated in August 2022.