Who is the Data Controller

Unitemps Heriot-Watt University (Unitemps HWU) is a recruitment business which provides work-finding services to its clients and work-seekers. We hold your personal data securely and restrict access to personal information to people who need to use it in the course of their duties.

Heriot-Watt University is the Data Controller for personal data we hold about you. When collecting and processing information about you, we must comply with the UK Data Protection Act, 2018, and the UK and European Union General Data Protection Regulations.

If you register with a different Unitemps branch, apply for their roles, or are engaged under a contract for services to work for them then they will act as data controller, their privacy notice will apply to the processing of your data and you should direct any queries to them directly.

1. What personal information we collect and use

We will collect your personal data directly from you via the website, except in exceptional circumstances where an alternative application method is required.

The data we collect and hold on you includes:

• Name
• Contact details, including telephone number, email address and postal address
• Experience, training, qualifications and skills
• CV – which may include job history and educational history
• Contact details of referees

We may also collect and hold special category data, for example relating to health or religion, if you have included this in your CV.

The Unitemps HWU will process your personal data for the purposes of providing you with work-finding services. This includes, contacting you about job opportunities, assessing your suitability for those opportunities, updating our databases, putting you forward for job opportunities, arranging payments to you and developing and managing our services and relationship with you and our clients.

If you have opted-in we may also send you marketing information and news via email. You can opt-out from receiving these at any time by clicking “unsubscribe” when you receive these communications from us.

In some cases we may be required to use your data for the purpose of investigating, reporting and detecting crime and also to comply with laws that apply to us. We may also use your information during the course of internal audits to demonstrate our compliance with certain industry standards.

We must have a legal basis to process your personal data. The legal bases we rely upon to offer our work-finding services to you are:

• To fulfil a contractual obligation that we have with youWhen you register your details on our website we ask you to agree to our terms of engagement. You will also be working under a Contract for Services should you find temporary work through Unitemps and we shall process your data as is necessary for the performance of this contract.
• Your consentWe may process your personal data on the basis that you have consented to us doing so for a specific purpose. We also ask for your consent to send you any marketing information.

  You may withdraw your consent to our processing of your personal information for a particular purpose at any stage. Please note that we may continue to retain, or otherwise use your personal information, where we have a legitimate interest or a legal or contractual obligation to do so. Our processing in that respect will be limited to what is necessary in order to comply with those interests or obligations.

• To comply with a legal obligation that we haveWe must comply with a number of statutory provisions, including the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003, when providing our recruitment services which require us to process personal data. These require us to:
  • verify a candidate’s identity
  • assess a candidate’s suitability for a job role
  • conduct right to work checks
  • payroll, tax, social security and HMRC requirements
• Where we have a legitimate interestThis is where Unitemps HWU has a legitimate reason to process your data provided it is reasonable and does not go against what you would reasonably expect from us. Where the Unitemps HWU has relied on a legitimate interest to process your personal data our legitimate interests are as follows:
  • managing our database and keeping work-seeker records up to date;
  • assessing your suitability and to contact you regarding potential opportunities and/or our services
  • in order to source potential opportunities or roles as part of our Recruitment Services
  • contacting you to seek consent where we need it;
  • retaining records of our dealings and transactions and where applicable, use such records for the purposes of:
    • establishing compliance with contractual obligations with Clients or suppliers
    • addressing any query or dispute that may arise including establishing, exercising or defending any legal claims
    • protecting our reputation
    • maintaining a back-up of our system, solely for the purpose of being able to restore the system to a particular point in the event of a system failure or security breach
    • financial reporting
    • determining staff training and system requirements
• Statutory/contractual requirementWe have certain legal and contractual requirements to collect personal data (e.g. to comply with the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003, immigration and tax legislation, and in some circumstances safeguarding requirements.) Our clients may also require this personal data, and we may need your data to enter into a contract with you. If you do not give us personal data we need to collect we may not be able to continue to provide work-finding services to you.

2. Who your information may be shared with and why

Unitemps is a franchise network and the details you provide will be shared with all of the UK Unitemps franchises in our network in order to provide you with our Recruitment Services. This does not include any data relating to your right to work within the UK nor any uploaded identification documents.

Unitemps HWU will also process your personal data and/or special category data with the following recipients:

• Hirers and clients, necessary for the provision of our Recruitment Services
• Your former or prospective new employers that we obtain or provide references to
• Any regulatory authority or statutory body pursuant to a request for information or any legal obligation which applies to us
• Parties who process data on our behalf to include:
  • IT support
  • Storage service providers including cloud
  • Legal and professional advisers
  • Identity Service Provider for digital right to work checks
  • Background screening providers
  • Payroll departments/bureaus
• Government, law enforcement agencies and other regulators e.g the Police, Home Office UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), Employment Agencies Standards Inspectorate (EASI), Department of Work and Pensions (DWP)

3. International data transfers

Unitemps HWU may transfer only the information you provide to us to countries outside the United Kingdom (UK) and European Economic Area (‘EEA’) for the purposes of providing you with work-finding services. We will only do this if the client and the job role are based outside the UK or the EEA. We will take steps to ensure adequate protections are in place to ensure the security of your information.

4. How long we keep your personal data

We will retain information about you for as long as necessary to fulfil the purpose for which it was collected. Different laws require us to keep different data for different periods of time. For example:

• The Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003, require us to keep work-seeker records for at least one year after the date on which we last provide you with work-finding services.
• We must keep payroll records, holiday pay, sick pay, and pensions auto-enrolment records for as long as is legally required by HMRC and associated national minimum wage, social security, and tax legislation. This is currently up to six years.
• We are currently required to hold records relating to your right to work for two years after the end of your engagement with us.

If you have never worked for us, we will hold information about you on our systems for two years from the last date of any activity on your profile. If you have worked for Unitemps we must keep some information about you to meet statutory requirements, this means that we will hold information about you on from our systems for seven years after your last period of engagement.

We will securely destroy this information as soon as practicable once the relevant retention period expires.

5. Your rights

Please be aware that you have the following data protection rights:

• The right to be informed about the personal data Unitemps HWU processes about you;
• The right of access to the personal data Unitemps HWU processes about you;
• The right to rectification of your personal data;
• The right to erasure of your personal data in certain circumstances;
• The right to restrict processing of your personal data;
• The right to data portability in certain circumstances;
• The right to object to the processing of your personal data that was based on a public or legitimate interest;
• The right not to be subjected to automated decision making and profiling; and
• The right to withdraw consent at any time.

Where you have consented to Unitemps HWU processing your personal data and special category data you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time by contacting dataprotection@hw.ac.uk. Please note that if you withdraw your consent to further processing, that does not affect any processing done prior to the withdrawal of that consent, or which is done according to another legal basis.

There may be circumstances where Unitemps HWU will still need to process your data for legal or official reasons. We will inform you if this is the case. Where this is the case, we will restrict the data to only what is necessary for the purpose of meeting those specific reasons.

If you believe that any of your data that Unitemps HWU processes is incorrect or incomplete, please contact us using the details above and we will take reasonable steps to check its accuracy and correct it where necessary.

You can also contact us using the above details if you want us to restrict the type or amount of data we process for you, access your personal data or exercise any of the other rights listed above.

6. Complaints or queries

If you wish to complain about this privacy notice or any of the procedures set out in it please contact dataprotection@hw.ac.uk or write to:

Data Protection Officer
Information Governance
Governance and Legal Services
Heriot-Watt University
Edinburgh
EH14 4AS

You also have the right to raise concerns with Information Commissioner’s Office on 0303 123 1113 or at https://ico.org.uk/concerns/, or any other relevant supervisory authority should your personal data be processed outside of the UK, if you believe that your data protection rights have not been adhered to.

7. Changes to this privacy notice

We will update this privacy notice from time to time. We will post any changes on the notice with revision dates. If we make any material changes, we will notify you.

This version was created August 2023.