Recruitment Candidate Privacy Policy
1. What is the purpose of this document?
Multiple Access Communications Ltd is a "controller" in relation to personal data. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you. You are being sent a copy of this privacy notice because you are applying for work with us (whether as an employee, worker or contractor). It makes you aware of how and why your personal data will be used, namely for the purposes of the recruitment exercise, and how long it will usually be retained for. It provides you with certain information that must be provided under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR).
2. Our Contact Details
Full name of Legal Entity: Multiple Access Communications Limited (MAC Ltd)
• Email Address: enquiries@macltd.com.
• Registered, and Postal Address: Delta House, Southampton Science Park, Southampton, SO16 7NS
• Registered company number: 1979185
You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner's Office (“ICO”), the UK regulator for data protection issues www.ico.org.uk.
We will comply with data protection law and principles, which means that your data will be:
• Used lawfully, fairly and in a transparent way.
• Collected only for valid purposes that we have clearly explained to you and not used in any way that is incompatible with those purposes.
• Relevant to the purposes we have told you about and limited only to those purposes.
• Accurate and kept up to date.
• Kept only as long as necessary for the purposes we have told you about.
• Kept securely.
4. The kind of information we hold about you
In connection with your application for work with us, we will collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you:
• The information you have provided to us in your curriculum vitae and covering letter including name, title, address, telephone number, personal email address, date of birth, gender, employment history, qualifications, and any other information you have chosen to supply.
• Any information you provide to us during an interview, including but not limited to qualifications and certifications, existing employment arrangements and existing remuneration and benefit packages;
• Any information you provided us on email during our selection process, including test results, project details, and anticipated test results
• Information collected from behavioural and personality self-assessment tools.
We may also collect, store and use the following types of more sensitive personal information:
• Information about criminal convictions and offences.
5. How is your personal information collected?
We collect personal information about candidates from the following sources:
• You, the candidate.
• Any recruitment agency, which we contractually engage with from time to time, from which we collect the categories of data listed above in ‘3 The kind of information we hold about you’.
• Disclosure and Barring Service in respect of criminal convictions
• Government’s National Security Vetting (NSV) outcomes in respect of validating security clearances at a variety of levels
• Data from third parties is from a publicly accessible sources such as LinkedIn and other professional networking and social media sites
• Your named referees, from whom we collect the following categories of data and ask you to obtain prior permission: their name, address, contact details, relationship to you the candidate.
We will use the personal information we collect about you to:
• Assess your skills, qualifications, and suitability for the role.
• Carry out background and reference checks, where applicable.
• Communicate with you about the recruitment process.
• Keep records related to our hiring processes.
• Comply with legal or regulatory requirements.
• We may connect with you on LinkedIn
It is in our legitimate interests to decide whether to appoint you to role since it would be beneficial to our business to appoint someone to that role.
We also need to process your personal information to decide whether to enter into a contract of employment with you.
Having received your CV and covering letter and the results from the tests and any questions which you took during your initial screening interview, we will then process that information to decide whether you meet the basic requirements to be shortlisted for the role. If you do, we will decide whether your application is strong enough to invite you for an interview. If we decide to call you for an interview, we will use the information you provide to us at the interview to decide whether to offer you the role. If we decide to offer you the role, we will then take up references, carry out a criminal record and national security vetting before confirming your employment.
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. For example, we will require references for this role and if you fail to provide us with relevant details, we will not be able to take your application further.
We envisage that we will process information about criminal convictions.
We will collect information about your criminal convictions history if we would like to offer you the role (conditional on checks and any other conditions, such as references, being satisfactory). We are entitled to carry out a criminal records check in order to satisfy ourselves that there is nothing in your criminal convictions history which makes you unsuitable for the role. In particular:
Our roles requires a high degree of trust and integrity since it involves dealing with government projects and so we would like to ask you to seek a basic disclosure of your criminal records history and undergo security vetting by United Kingdom Security Vetting (UKSV). We will also carry out a NSV (SC) check.
All information required for the records checks will be inputted by you, directly into a government system. We will not be in receipt of any inputted information, only the output certification if you choose to share it with us.
We have in place an appropriate policy document and safeguards which we are required by law to maintain when processing such data and certifications that are provided to us.
10. Automated decision-making
You will not be subject to decisions that will have a significant impact on you based solely on automated decision-making.
11. Data sharing
Why might you share my personal information with third parties? We will only share your personal information with the following third parties for the purposes of processing your application: Zoho Recruit acting as our application management software package.
All our third-party service providers and other entities in the group 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.
12. 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. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors 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. Details of these measures may be obtained from the Data Protection Officer.
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.
13. 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 14 months after we have communicated to you or the agency our decision not to appoint you to the role. We retain your personal information for that period so that we can show, in the event of a legal claim, that we have not discriminated against candidates on prohibited grounds and that we have conducted the recruitment exercise in a fair and transparent way. We also retain your information for that time to support our contractual commitment with recruitment agencies which we use from time to time. After this period, we will securely destroy your personal information in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
Our software package, Zoho Recruit will delete any data we delete from their active database after six months, and delete from back-up after a further 3 months. Their sub-processor, Daxtra; retains data for 36 months. You must be comfortable using both Zoho and Daxtra to submit your application.
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.
14. Rights of access, correction, erasure, and restriction
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 the Data Protection Officer in writing.
Right to withdraw consent
When you applied for this role, you provided consent by way of submitting your application to us for processing your personal information for the purposes of the recruitment exercise. You have the right to withdraw your consent for processing for that purpose at any time. To withdraw your consent, please contact the Data Protection Officer. Once we have received notification that you have withdrawn your consent, we will no longer process your application and, subject to our retention policy, we will dispose of your personal data securely.
15. Updating information
Please let us know if the personal data that we hold about you needs to be corrected or updated.
16. Amendments
We may update this policy from time to time. You should check this page occasionally to ensure you are happy with any changes to this policy. We may notify you of significant changes to this policy.
17. No fee usually required
You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we could refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.
18. Data Protection Officer
We have appointed a Data Protection Officer (DPO) 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 the DPO contact the DPO. You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) who is responsible for data protection issues in the UK www.ico.org.uk.
Updated: March 2025, V2.2
