Privacy and Cookies

Privacy Statement

Updated 19th November 2020

This website is operated and controlled by the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities [COSLA] on behalf of its member organisations. myjobscotland is the national shared recruitment portal for Scotland's 32 local authorities, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, and Further & Higher Education institutions. It advertises job vacancies online through a single internet portal managed by COSLA. The portal allows candidates in any location to view vacancies and submit applications online to the organisation advertising the vacancy. Candidates may also register to receive job alerts via email should they wish to do so. This policy is designed to inform you of COSLA's commitment to upholding your right to privacy and how COSLA will handle your personal data when you use myjobscotland.gov.uk

Information you supply will be processed by COSLA in accordance with the requirements and principles of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018.

COSLA is registered with the Information Commissioner as a data controller under the following address and registration number: Convention Of Scottish Local Authorities, Verity House, 19 Haymarket Yards, Edinburgh EH12 5BH - Registration No: Z6216554

COSLA is the data controller in relation to the myjobscotland registration database and/or if you apply for a job specifically advertised by COSLA.

Legal basis for using your information

The legal basis for processing information relating to user registration is:

• necessary for the performance of a contract with the individual (i.e. providing a user with access to the myjobscotland website, responding to user queries/issues relation to a registered account) and/or;
• legitimate interests (i.e. administration of the website)

In the case of recruitment where COSLA is listed as the recruiting organisation, COSLA remains the data controller and will process your personal information as necessary to take steps to potentially enter into a contract with you.

Who do we share your information with?

Information entered onto the myjobscotland website is stored in a database (e-recruitment solution called TalentLink) managed by Cornerstone on COSLA's behalf.

The organisation to which you are applying is given limited access to this database (TalentLink), in order to process your application for a vacancy.

Once the closing date has been reached all submitted application information will be made available to the organisation to which you have applied, and they are obligated to handle your data in accordance with their policy.

No incomplete application information is visible/available to COSLA or the recruiting organisation.

At the point of submission the recruiting organisation becomes the data controller. To view the organisation privacy notices go to the organisation privacy notices page.

Application forms and personal data

If you choose to apply for a vacancy with one of the organisations featured on the website, the following information will be requested from you.

• Contact information e.g. your name, address, email, contact telephone number
• A description of your work experience, skills and education
• Responses to specific application questions
• Details of interview assessments
• Equal Opportunity monitoring information
• Any supplementary information you choose to support your application e.g. qualifying documents

Once you have submitted an application it is centrally stored on an e-recruitment database (TalentLink - e-recruitment solution provided by Saba) and will be accessible to the recruiting organisation. If you use the "CV Upload" function to fill in your application form, it is stored in an ‘Apply’ database which is where all the candidate data goes before being added to the TalentLink. The CV is permanently deleted from this database after 24 hours. The CV file is never passed through nor visible to the end organisation.

This information will be used solely for the purposes of recruitment by the HR/recruitment/personnel department of that organisation. It will be made clear to you at the point of submitting your application which organisation will have access to your data.

By not submitting an application, by withdrawing an application, or by request that your application or account is deleted, you are opting out of the recruitment process.

How long do we keep your information for?

If you have registered an account but haven't activated it (using the activation link emailed to you at the point of registering) your account will be labelled inactive and will be automatically deleted from the myjobscotland registration database (platform - Drupal) after 6 months.

If you have registered an account and activated it, and have submitted an application(s) via your account, the data will be anonymised/archived, by removing personal details such as your name, address, email, contact telephone number, after five years of inactivity on your account. Inactivity is denoted as having not submitted an application form, and the status hasn't been changed to In Process, within a five year timeframe.

Accounts cannot be unarchived after this period. Therefore the onus is on you to keep your account active should you wish to continue to access your application information, and to keep copies of your submitted applications.

Successful candidate information will be retained on the e-recruitment database (TalentLink) for seven years.

If you are not offered a job, in accordance with the above, your application information will remain on your account until it is archived, or unless you request for it to be deleted.

Each organisation may have their own data retention policies so please check with the recruiting organisation. To view the organisation privacy notices go to the organisation privacy notices page.

COSLA will not sell or rent your personal information to third parties. We may make information available to tax and law enforcement agencies, as required or permitted by law.

Saba (who provide TalentLink) also apply a retention policy on data backups to ensure data is not retained longer than can reasonably anticipated and is required for service operation. Daily backups are secured, stored and recycled for up to 6 months. All backups are encrypted and/or held on encrypted storage for the retention period.

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. You can update your personal details via your myjobscotland account, and reapply for the same position up to the point of a position closing (as determined by the closing date). Once an application has been completed you may ask the recruiting organisation directly to correct any personal information about you that you believe does not meet these standards. The contact information for recruiting organisations is available here.
• 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 iii. Our use of your personal information is contrary to law or other legal obligations

Account deletion - right to be forgotten

At any point you can request the removal of your personal data from the myjobscotland registration database and e-recruitment system, by emailing myjobscotland@cosla.gov.uk. Please provide the email address you used when registering an account.

You will then be contacted by a member of the myjobscotland team based at COSLA and asked a number of security questions to ensure the validity of your request.

If you request that your account is deleted that will also include the deletion of all applications associated with that account.

Once your account has been deleted by COSLA (from the registration database and e-recruitment system) we recommend that you contact each individual organisation, to whom you have applied, to request that they also delete any data they might hold about you in relation to their recruitment process, since they are the data controllers at the point of submitting an application and they might handle your data out with the e-recruitment system e.g. print off application for shortleeting/shortlisting etc.

To view the organisation privacy notices go to the organisation privacy notices page.

Right of access - Subject Access Requests

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018, you can make a subject access request for the personal information held about you, subject to certain limitations.

COSLA is the data controller in relation to the myjobscotland registration database. If you would like to submit a subject access request, please submit a request in writing or by email. Email: myjobscotland@cosla.gov.uk Address: Data Protection Manager, COSLA, Verity House, 19 Haymarket Yards, Edinburgh EH12 5BH.

If you would like to submit a subject access request regarding any submitted applications (personal data and other supplementary information) during the recruitment process, please submit a request in writing or by email to the relevant council(s)/organisation(s) to whom you have applied. Go to the Contact Us section of the website for links to the relevant council/organisation contact details.

Complaints

If you are not happy about how your personal information has been handled in relation to the myjobscotland registration database, or when applying for a position with COSLA, you can contact COSLA's Data Protection Manager by emailing: myjobscotland@cosla.gov.uk. 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.

Job Alerts

By setting up a job alert you are consenting to emails being sent to the email address you registered with based on the job alert criteria you have selected.

Your job alert account will remain on the myjobscotland registration database (platform - Drupal) until it is either manually deleted by yourself, or upon request that your full myjobscotland account is deleted since any job alerts linked to that same account (based on the email address used) will also be deleted at the same time.

Your job alert data isn't used for any other purpose than to send job alerts to the email address you have specified upon creation. No job alert data is shared with any 3rd parties.

You can adjust the number/criteria of job alerts by logging in to your myjobscotland account and clicking on the edit button.

If you no longer wish to consent to receive job alerts, please delete your job alert(s) or click on the Edit button and untick the consent box at the bottom of the screen in the My Searches and Alert screen. The myjobscotland team is unable to deactivate job alerts on your behalf.

All job alert data is stored on the myjobscotland registration database (platform - Drupal).

reCAPTCHA

Our website uses Google reCAPTCHA, a service provided by Google that helps protect our website from spam by using analysis techniques that can identify if a user is human rather than a machine.

Your entry in the reCAPTCHA field will be sent to Google in the USA and processed by Google for this purpose. The reCAPTCHA application will also send your IP address and other data to Google to enable it to provide the reCAPTCHA service. By using reCAPTCHA, you agree to Google processing your data for this purpose. The IP address provided as part of Google reCAPTCHA will not be merged with other Google data.

For more information about Google’s Terms of use and Privacy for reCAPTCHA, please visit https://www.google.com/about/company/user-consent-policy.html

Statistical Analysis

Your application may be anonymised to facilitate statistical analysis, such as the number of applicants, number of candidates short listed, approximate geographic locations of candidates, etc.

We also automatically collect statistics about visits to our website using Google Analytics. These statistics do not contain personal data and cannot be traced back to an individual.

IP Addresses

All IP addresses are anonymised on Google Analytics when we collect statistics about visits to our website.

Your IP address might be used to help us track and fix issues with your account/myjobscotland website. The storage of IP addresses are as below:

• Apache back-ups - stored up to 1 month
• Drupal (account registration database) - stored for up to 14 days

Cookies Consent Policy

myjobscotland uses session cookies to enhance your interaction with our site.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. A cookie will typically contain the name of the domain from which the cookie has come, the "lifetime" of the cookie, and a value, usually a randomly generated unique number. Cookies can help a website to arrange content to match your preferred interests more quickly. Most major websites use cookies. Cookies cannot be used by themselves to identify you.

Session cookies last only for the duration of your visit and are deleted when you close your browser. These facilitate various tasks such as allowing a website to identify that a user of a particular device is navigating from page to page, supporting website security or basic functionality.

The cookies we use on the myjobscotland site are mainly session cookies. They help us to ensure the security of your application session, and can also keep you logged in to the myjobscotland site while you move between sections and pages on your account. Our session security cookies are designed to be very difficult to read, change, access or use except by us when you have an active session. They contain no personal information that can be used to identify you.

In addition, all cookies used on the myjobscotland website are rated Strictly Necessary or for Performance.

If you are concerned about the potential use of information gathered from your computer by cookies, you can set your browser to prompt you before it accepts a cookie. Most Internet browsers have settings that let you identify and/or reject cookies.

Third Party Cookies

The site uses Google Analytics which generates statistics about visitors and visits to the myjobscotland site and applications.

These cookies enable the function of Google Analytics. This helps us take and analyse visitor information such as browser usage, new visitor numbers, response to marketing activity and server response times. That information helps us to improve the website and your application experience. All IP addresses are anonymised.

The data stored by these cookies can be seen only by the relevant team at COSLA and Google and never shows any confidential information.

Social Sharing: If you take the opportunity to 'share' our content with friends through social networks i.e Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc you may be sent cookies from these websites. We don't control the setting of these cookies, so please check those third-party websites for more information about their cookies and how to manage them.

What if I don't want to accept cookies?

You can choose to restrict or block the cookies set by myjobscotland, or any website. You'll need to do this through your browser settings.

Please note: if you block or restrict cookies on your machine, the myjobscotland website may be unable to function correctly.

You can also visit http://www.allaboutcookies.org for comprehensive information on how to block or restrict cookies on a wide variety of browsers. You'll also find details on how to delete cookies from your computer, as well as more general information about cookies.

For information on how to do this on the browser of your mobile phone you'll need to refer to your handset manual.

External Links and Videos

Links and videos to external websites sitting within this website www.myjobscotland.gov.uk

are not covered by this policy and individuals should check the privacy policy of each individual site for their terms and privacy notices.

 

COSLA is not responsible for the content or policies of external websites.

Advertising

The Council Advertising Network [CAN] is responsible for delivering external advertising on the myjobscotland.gov.uk website.

Please take a moment to read their privacy policy which includes cookie information and details on how to opt out individually to their advertising partners: https://can-digital.net/can-privacy-policy/

It may be useful to know that for all other websites, the WebChoices tool provides a list of over 130 internet advertisers and advertising technology companies. You can choose individual advertisers or can opt of all interest-based or behavioural advertising using the tool. You can opt out directly via the WebChoices website at: http://optout.aboutads.info/.

Please note that using WebChoices or a direct opt out link to opt out will not prevent advertising from being displayed on your browser. It will, however, stop advertisers from providing interest-based or behavioural advertising so you will see advertising that is not targeted/tailored to your browsing history.

Post a Job with Us

Non partner organisation can advertise on the myjobscotland website. Information is available on the Post a Job with Us section. This style of advertising is self-managed, and requires the purchase of tokens to use against the publication of positions. The purchasing of tokens is handled by PayPal. View PayPal's privacy policy: https://www.paypal.com/en/webapps/mpp/ua/privacy-full

Once you have made payment you will receive an email containing the number of credits that you have purchased. This email should be received within 24 hours of purchase. Once received you can use the credits at your own leisure. There is no timeframe expiry for the purchase of these credits.

Refunds can be requested within 14 days of purchase, but will only be based on the amount of credits assigned to your account at the time of request.

We do not store credit card details nor do we share customer details with any 3rd parties

Surveys

Personal data you give us when you complete one of our surveys:

• Name
• Email address
• IP address

We use Google or Microsoft Forms for sending out surveys.

You can find out more on the relevant privacy notices at https://policies.google.com/privacy or https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/security-and-privacy-in-microsoft-forms-7e57f9ba-4aeb-4b1b-9e21-b75318532cd9 .

Our legal basis for processing your personal data is that we have a legitimate interest to process your personal data and it’s so that we can process survey responses and analyse the results.