Work experience privacy notice

What is the purpose of this document?

Field Seymour Parkes LLP (“FSP”) is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information.

This privacy notice explains how we obtain and manage your data in relation to any application you make to us for a work experience placement or open day attendance. It provides you with certain information that must be provided under the General Data Protection Regulation.

FSP is a “data controller”. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you.

Data protection principles

We will comply with data protection law and principles, which means that your data will be:

1. Used lawfully, fairly and in a transparent way.
2. Collected only for valid purposes that we have clearly explained to you and not used in any way that is incompatible with those purposes.
3. Relevant to the purposes we have told you about and limited only to those purposes.
4. Accurate and kept up to date.
5. Kept only as long as necessary for the purposes we have told you about.
6. Kept securely.

The kind of information we hold about you

The information we will hold about you will depend on the stage you reach within the application process.

For open days and short, informal work experience/shadowing arrangements, we will need limited information relating to your identification and contact details (including your age) together with basic information about your education, qualifications and experience. If your application is successful we may also require details of emergency contact details and any health considerations (such as disabilities, allergies, epilepsy etc) to protect you during your visit.

For our formal work experience placements we will require the above information and more details concerning your education, qualifications and achievements, work history and relevant experience, career aspirations and professional memberships etc.

We may obtain this information from you directly, from a parent or guardian, your school or other educational establishment.

Information in the public domain may also be obtained, such as public records relating to professional memberships/admission, information on LinkedIn or other social media sites and information on any current employer’s website (if relevant).

You may also be asked to volunteer information to assist our diversity monitoring age, race or ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation and political opinions. Such information is kept securely away from your application data and is not used in order to make any decisions about your suitability for a placement. More information is provided on the forms we use for monitoring.

At a later stage in your application for a work experience placement we may ask you to provide evidence of your qualifications and we may require academic or employer references to confirm your suitability for a placement with us.

Any information we require at this later stage of your application will be explained fully to you at the time. No third parties are contacted for any information not in the public domain without you being advised in advance.

How we will use information about you

We will use the personal information we collect about you to:

• Assess your suitability to attend an open day or for a placement with us.
• Communicate with you about the appointment process.
• Keep records related to our hiring processes.
• Comply with legal or regulatory requirements.
• Carry out background and reference checks, where applicable.

It is in our legitimate interests to process information about you to decide whether you are a suitable person to attend an open day and to ensure that the most suitable candidates are selected for our work experience programme. The processing is also necessary to comply with our professional and legal obligations.

If you fail to provide personal information

If you fail to provide information when requested, which is necessary for us to consider your application (such as evidence of qualifications or work history), we will not be able to process your application successfully and we may withdraw any invitation made to you.

Special Categories of data (sensitive personal information)

As your application progresses we may obtain sensitive personal information about you known as ‘special categories’ of data.

We will use your particularly sensitive personal information in the following ways:

• We will use information about your disability status to consider whether we need to provide appropriate adjustments during the recruitment process, for example whether adjustments need to be made during an interview. If you receive an offer from us we will use disability and health information to protect your safety and make adjustments to allow you to participate as fully as possible during your visit.
• We will use information about your race or national or ethnic origin, religious, philosophical or moral beliefs, or your sexual life or sexual orientation, to ensure meaningful equal opportunity monitoring and reporting.

Automated decision-making

You will not be subject to decisions that will have a significant impact on you based solely on automated decision-making.

Data sharing

Why might you share my personal information with third parties?

We will only share your data with third parties for the purposes of progressing your application, and preparing for the commencement of your placement/visit. The third parties may include your parent, guardian, education provider, any vacancy advertising platform through which you apply to us and our recruitment/HR system providers.  We may also seek academic or employment references for work experience students.

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 our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes. We only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

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. Access to your personal information is limited to those partners, employees, agents, consultants 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?

If your application is unsuccessful, we will retain your personal information for a period of 12 months from the date of receipt of your application

We retain your personal information for that period:

To monitor recruitment activity and help us take management decisions to improve our processes;

For reference should you apply for a similar role within that period, to help us assess your suitability;

To enable us to defend any claim (such as a discrimination claim) made in relation to your application.

If you attend our offices for work experience purposes we will retain your basic personal information for a period of 7 years after completion of the placement so that we can show, in the event of a legal claim, that you were attending on a voluntary basis and did not have employee or worker status and the associated protections.  We will also retain this information for the purposes of ensuring you comply with your confidentiality obligations and to avoid inadvertently offering the same candidates a placement each year

After these periods, and subject to our email retention policy, we will securely destroy your personal information in accordance with our data retention policy.

If we wish to retain your personal information on file, on the 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 explicit consent to retain your personal information for a fixed period on that basis.

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 Rashmi Mohan, Compliance Manager, in writing.

We have appointed Rashmi Mohan 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 Rashmi. You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues.

If you have any questions about this privacy notice, please contact Rashmi Mohan, Compliance Manager, 0118 951 6209, [email protected]. 

Issue date:  January 2024