Recruitment Privacy Statement

The following statement explains how data is managed for the purposes of recruitment, specifically managing the data received by GCC from job applicants as potential new employees.

Who we are?

Glasgow City Council is a local authority established under the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994 and having its chief office at City Chambers, George Square, Glasgow G2 1DU, United Kingdom.  You can contact our data protection officer by post at this address, or by email at: dataprotection@glasgow.gov.uk, or by telephone - 0141 287 1055. Please do not contact this number/email address in relation to your job application - inquiries about the application process should be made to the contact point listed in the advertisement.

Why do we need your personal information and what do we do with it?

You are giving us your personal information to allow us to effectively manage your application through our recruitment processes and for us to meet our obligations to you as a prospective employer.

Throughout the duration of the recruitment process and the lifetime of any prospective  employment relationship with Glasgow City Council the information you provide will be used for the following purposes:

• Your name, national insurance number and contact details, including your home address, telephone numbers and email addresses will be used to identify you and communicate with you as necessary.
• During the recruitment process or at times during your prospective employment information may be gathered to assess your suitability to perform specific roles such as PVG and disclosure checks.  In addition, information will be gathered to check eligibility to work in the United Kingdom.
• Information in relation to employment history, qualifications, training certification and licences (such as a driving licence) may be required in order to validate that you are appropriately qualified to undertake the activities of the post applied for and to ensure calculation of allowances or statutory payments for which you are entitled.
• Successful candidates personal banking details are required in order to process all payments due to you in respect of your employment with Glasgow City Council.
• Information in respect of your health may be gathered via a pre-employment health check by our Occupational Health Provider.  This information is required for positions as identified via our risk assessment process.  This information is captured to ensure that we comply with our statutory responsibilities.
• During the recruitment process, you may be invited to disclose personal characteristic information as defined in the equality act 2010 and other equalities related information.  This information is used for statistical monitoring of Glasgow City Council's applicants and candidates.
• Some posts require prospective employees to have Disclosure checks or PVG checks made against them.  In these cases the council will process information regarding criminal convictions (and any police intelligence regarding suspected criminality included in a PVG check) to assess your suitability for the post in question.

Some applicants may also be service users.  We process information on service users (including service users who are job applicants) in accordance with the privacy statements published for the various services we provide and you should consult those service delivery privacy statements for details of this processing.

Legal basis for using your information

These services are provided in terms of the council's statutory functions as a local authority, more details of which can be found on our website at www.glasgow.gov.uk/privacy.  In the case of recruitment, processing your personal information is necessary to take steps to potentially enter into a contract with you.  If you do not provide us with the information we have asked for then we will not be able to process your application for employment.  Some information needs to be shared with external bodies because the council is under a legal obligation to do so.

Who do we share your information with?

We are legally obliged to safeguard public funds so details will be checked internally for fraud prevention and verification purposes and may be shared with other public bodies for the same purpose.  We are legally obliged to share certain data with other public bodies such as HMRC and will do so where the law requires this; we will also generally comply with requests for specific information from other regulatory and law enforcement bodies where this is necessary and proportionate.  Information is also analysed internally in order to provide management information, inform service delivery reform and similar purposes.  This is in accordance with the council's Information Use and Privacy Policy, the privacy statement set out in full on our website, and the provisions of our Records Management Plan approved in terms of the Public Records (Scotland) Act 2012.

In some circumstances there will be a requirement to share some information with organisation external to Glasgow City Council:

• Depending upon the nature of the post applied for, relevant information may be shared with relevant registered employment bodies such at the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) or General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS)
• Information gathered in respect of accidents at work may be gathered and may be shared with the HSE as required.
• Your personal details may be shared with the council's insurance provider for the purposes of insurance policies held by the council in respect of Employers Liability Insurance, Indemnification of employees and other insurance purposes as necessary.
• If at any time before, during or subsequent to application for employment you exercise your rights to enter into a dispute via the courts system, including employment tribunal, we may be required to share information in relation to your employment relationship with the courts or legal representatives as required.
• If you have ever had an appointment with Glasgow City Council's current or previous occupational health provider, you may have an occupational health record.  Such records are retained by the current occupational health provider.  The contents of your medical records are confidential and are not disclosed to Glasgow City Council but will inform any occupational health reports issued to Glasgow City Council by the occupational health provider.
• In the event that Glasgow City Council change occupational health provider, these medical records will transfer directly to the new provider and will not pass to Glasgow City Council.
• The council is obliged to participate in the National Fraud Initiative in Scotland and in terms of this passes information on staff (primarily payroll data) to Audit Scotland for data matching to detect fraud or possible fraud.  Details of this exercise can be found on Audit Scotland's website at http://www.audit-scotland.gov.uk/our-work/national-fraud-initiative.
• Glasgow City Council is subject to freedom of information ("FOI") legislation.  Often we receive requests which seek disclosure of information about members of staff.  Such requests are assessed carefully and we will only release staff information in response to FOI requests if doing so is compatible with our obligations under data protection law.  As a general rule we will withhold the identities of staff on grade 8 or below, and release the identities of staff on grade 9 or above, unless there are particular reasons to depart from this approach (such as where staff are involved in areas of work where disclosing their identity could endanger them).  We will not voluntarily release non-work related information about members of staff such as home address, nor will we voluntarily release information where this relates to the member of staff being a service user rather than in their capacity as an employee.  We will seek the views of current members of staff as to any such release.
• For senior officer appointments, your details (including your completed application form) will be shared with an executive recruitment agency supporting the Council with Recruitment & Assessment Centre Services.

International transfers

Information published on the council's website (including video footage of webcast meetings and committee reports) can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

How long do we keep your information for?

The council maintains a records retention and disposal schedule which sets out how long we hold different types of information for.   This is available on the council's website at www.glasgow.gov.uk/rrds or you can request a hard copy from the contact address previously stated above.

Your rights under data protection law

• Access to your information - You have the right to request a copy of the personal information about you that we hold.
• Correcting your information - We want to make sure that your personal information is accurate, complete and up to date and you may ask us to correct any personal information about you that you believe does not meet these standards.
• Deletion of your information - You have the right to ask us to delete personal information about you where:

I. You consider that we no longer require the information for the purposes for which it was obtained

II. You have validly objected to our use of your personal information - see Objecting to how we may use your information below

III. Our use of your personal information is contrary to law or our other legal obligations.

Objecting to how we may use your information 

You have the right at any time to require us to stop using your personal information for direct marketing purposes.

Restricting how we may use your information

In some cases, you may ask us to restrict how we use your personal information.  This right might apply, for example, where we are checking the accuracy of personal information about you that we hold or assessing the validity of any objection you have made to our use of your information.  The right might also apply if we no longer have a basis for using your personal information but you don't want us to delete the data.  Where this right is validly exercised, we may only use the relevant personal information with your consent, for legal claims or where there are other public interest grounds to do so.

Please contact us in any of the ways set out above if you wish to exercise any of these rights.

Complaints

If you do not have access to the internet you can contact us on the above number to request hard copies of any of the above documents. We seek to resolve directly all complaints about how we handle personal information.  If your complaint is about how we have handled your personal information, you can contact the Council's Data Protection Officer by email at dataprotection@glasgow.gov.uk or by telephone on 0141 287 1055.  However you also have the right to lodge a complaint about data protection matters with the Information Commissioner's Office, whose contact details are as follows:  Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF

Phone:  0303 123 1113 (local rate) or 01625 545 745 or via our Website

Complaints of unfair treatment during the recruitment and selection process will be dealt with in line with the recruitment complaints procedure, details of which are made available to all applicants as part of the recruitment package.

More information: There is more detail on how the council processes personal information on our website at www.glasgow.gov.uk/privacy.