Privacy policy

Peterborough City Council is the data controller and a processor of the personal data as described in this privacy notice. This notice should be read alongside the Terms and Conditions of this website.

This privacy notice relates to the personal data and special category data collected as part of the council’s recruitment website.

What information are we processing

When you access the Website via any means, use the Online Vacancy Listings, Application Forms, Reference Forms, register an account, complete pre-screening questions, respond to or participate in any survey or questionnaire sent to you by us, provide comments via the Contact Us form, add yourself to a Talent Pool, update your Talent Profile or visit the job vacancies, we may collect, store and use certain of your personal information in line with this policy. We may also ask you for information when you report a problem with the Website or the Online Content.

To register on the Website, we ask for your name, email address, postcode and a secret question and answer. As part of your Talent profile, you may also provide further personal details such as location, education and employment history and personal statements. When you make an application Peterborough City Council will also collect and process further details relevant to the recruitment process. If you contact us, we may also keep a record of that correspondence.

We may also collect data relating to your visits to the Website that cannot identify you but records your use of our Website and Online Content including, for example, details of how long you have used the Website for.

We may also receive information about you from third parties (such as employers’ references) who are requested to disclose that information as part of the recruitment process.

How we use your information

When you access the Website via any means, use the Online Vacancy Listings, Application Forms, Reference Forms, register an account, complete pre-screening questions, respond to or participate in any survey or questionnaire sent to you by us, provide comments via the Contact Us form, add yourself to a Talent Pool, update your Talent Profile or visit the job vacancies, you understand that your personal information may be collected, stored, used and shared by us for any of the following purposes:

• to process your application for roles with Peterborough City Council
• to comply with legal and regulatory requirements;
• to fulfil any contractual agreements between you and us;
• We may use your email address to send you vacancy notifications and updates about our Services. You can control your email preferences in the My Details section, visible when logged in
• if you have registered for Job Alerts, to send you details of relevant vacancies which may interest you. You can stop these Job Alerts at any time by altering your preferences in the Job Alerts section under My Details. This is visible when logged in to the system.
• If you have switched on your Talent Profile to alert you to jobs which match your preferences. Again, you can control whether or not Peterborough City Council can contact you and you can remove yourself from the talent pools by using the options in the 'My Talent Profile' section, visible when logged in;
• to manage the account that you hold with us;
• to provide, maintain, protect and improve the quality of the Website and the Online Vacancies and Content we offer, including by conducting anonymised market research, and to protect us and our users;
• to provide you with a personalised browsing experience when using the Website and to allow you to use the full range of features on or via our Website;

Storage of Information

All information is stored on PageUp’s (our data processor) secure servers. When you register, we will ask you to choose a password which enables you to access the Online Content. You are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share this password with anyone.

All information is held on servers are based in the UK and all data centres are ISO 27001 and 9001 certified. All data stored sits within a secure hosting environment that meets mandated compliance regulations, and our infrastructure is managed by government security cleared employees.

Some of our core Recruitment activities may issue additional communications via SMS. These types of communications are optional and only with the consent of the applicant. Please note if you Opt into SMS communications, for processing purposes your mobile number maybe stored on a secure US server by PageUp.

Legal Basis for Processing Your Information

Our legal basis for collecting and using the personal information described above will depend on the personal information concerned and the specific context in which we collect it.

However, we will normally collect personal information from you only (i) where we have your consent to do so, or (ii) where we need the personal information to perform a contract with you, or (iii) where processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or (iv) where the processing is in our legitimate interests and not overridden by your rights. In some cases, we may also have a legal obligation to collect personal information from you.

If we ask you to provide personal information to comply with a legal requirement or to perform a contract with you, we will make this clear at the relevant time and advise you whether the provision of your personal information is mandatory or not (as well as the possible consequences if you do not provide your information).

Similarly, if we collect and use your personal information in reliance on our legitimate interests (or those of any third party), we/they will make clear to you at the relevant time what those legitimate interests are.

Disclosure of Your Information

We will only disclose your personal information to third parties when permitted by law including:

(a) with your consent (for example to obtain references as part of your application);

(b) to our suppliers/data processors in order for them to help us provide our services to you, this includes:

• our provider of file storage and management services if you email us directly;
• where you have made use of our 'send to a friend' option, solely to enable the person to whom you have sent the vacancy to see who has done so; and
• our customer service software if you contact our support team.

These suppliers’ use of your personal data may be subject to their own privacy policies, which are available on their websites, and which we suggest you familiarise yourself within the relevant circumstances set out above.

(c) if we are under a duty to disclose or share your information in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply our Terms and other agreements; or to protect our rights, property, or safety, our users, or others. This includes exchanging information with other organisations for the purposes of fraud protection or to prevent or detect crime.

Data Retention

We retain personal information in line with our retention schedule and is retained where we have an ongoing legitimate business need to do so (for example, to provide you with a service you have requested or to comply with applicable legal, tax or accounting requirements).

When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymise it or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.

Your Rights

You have rights under Data Protection and these are stated on our Data Protection Rights page.

The request will be submitted to the Data Protection Officer and the Information Governance Service. There are reasons why we may not be able to agree to your request, but we will explain why and always look to see how we can help you.

Please note that:

You can edit your personal details via your profile page whenever you wish. We maintain a procedure in order to help you confirm that your personal information remains correct and up-to-date or choose whether or not you wish to receive material from us or some of our partners.

You may unsubscribe from certain email communications by updating your preferences for Job Alerts and Talent Pools. You may also update your personal information by logging into the Website and visiting the 'My Details' page. You may also write to us order to access, correct, delete or update your personal information on our systems.

If we have collected and processed your personal information on the basis of your consent, then you can withdraw your consent at any time. Withdrawing your consent will not affect the lawfulness of any processing we conducted prior to your withdrawal, nor will it affect processing of your personal information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent. You can withdraw consent by contacting the details listed at the end of this statement.

The Website may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of third parties. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal information to these websites.

Cookies

Peterborough City Council uses cookies to enhance your interaction with our site. The cookies in this website are not used to track users through the system if they are not logged in and when a user registers they are accepting these secure cookies to be sent to their devices.

For more information about cookies, including further details as to what they are and how to refuse them, please see our Cookies policy.

Research

Peterborough City Council carry out research to promote good employment and equality practice. Our aim is to ensure that no employee, applicant or prospective applicant receives less favourable treatment because of the protected characteristics set out by the Equality Act 2010.

Should Peterborough City Council decide to carry out research or to permit other parties to carry out research using data collected on the database then it shall always be conducted using information which has had personal identifiable details expunged from the data being looked at.

Data used in this research would include anonymised Equal Opportunities information.

We may also conduct research on where you saw a vacancy and, on occasion, general geographical details such as the first section of a postcode (PE1 for example).

Updating this Privacy Policy

From time to time it will be necessary to update our privacy policy. If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will indicate that changes have been made on the homepage. This is in order to ensure our users are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.

If at any point we wish to use personally-identifiable information in a manner different from that stated at the time it was collected, we will notify users by way of an email. Users will have a choice as to whether or not we use their information in this different manner.

Contacting Us

If you have any questions or are unhappy about how your information has been collected, used or stored then you can contact the Data Protection Officer for Peterborough City Council:

The Information Commissioner’s Office is the UK's independent body set up to uphold information rights. Their role is to uphold information rights in the public interest. They can be contacted as below: