Candidate & Employee Privacy Notice
Specsavers are committed to protect the privacy and security of your personal information.
This privacy notice describes how we collect and use personal information about you during and after your working relationship with us, in accordance with the applicable Data Protection legislation. This notice applies to candidates, current and former employees, workers and contractors.
1. About Specsavers
The members of the Specsavers group of stores, support offices and companies (hereafter referred to as “we”, “us” or “Specsavers”) are joint “data controllers” of your personal information. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you and provide an overview of this.
2. What personal information is collected
We may collect and process the following information about you:
- Personal contact details such as name, title, addresses, telephone numbers, and personal email addresses.
- Date of birth.
- Gender.
- Marital status and dependants.
- Next of kin and emergency contact information.
- National Insurance number, national identification number, social security number or its equivalent.
- Bank account details, salary and payroll records and tax status information.
- Nationality and information relating to your immigration status.
- Annual leave, pension and benefits information.
- Trade union membership.
- Copy of driving licence.
- Information about criminal convictions and offences and information gathered when undertaken background checks (if appropriate given the nature of the role and where we are legally able to do so).
- Recruitment information (including copies of right to work documentation, references and other information included in a CV or cover letter or as part of the application process).
- Employment records (including job titles, work history, location of employment or workplace, working hours, holidays, training records and professional memberships, reason for leaving).
- Performance information including appraisals and performance review.
- Disciplinary and grievance information.
- Information about your health, including any medical condition, health and sickness records where this is related to your work.
- Information about your use of our information and communications systems which will include information about the devices you use including mobile devices, location, browser, messaging systems, communications history and IP address.
- CCTV footage and other information obtained through electronic means such as your security pass.
- Photographs for an identity card or in marketing or promotional materials.
This information will primarily be collected from you, but we may also collect it from other sources where it is lawful to do so as part of the recruitment/employment.
3. Purpose and Legal basis for the information collected
We’ll use the information you provide during the recruitment process to progress your application with a view to offering you an employment contract with us.
After employment information will be used for purposes of managing your employment with us and for us to fulfil our legal and regulatory requirements.
Our legal basis for processing the information is:
- Where we need to perform the contract, we have with you.
- Where we need to comply with a legal obligation.
- Where it is necessary for legitimate interests pursued by us or a third party and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests.
- We may also process your personal information in the following situations, which are likely to be rare:
- In limited circumstances, with your explicit written consent.
- Where it is necessary to protect you or another person from harm.
Less commonly, we may process this type of information where it is needed in relation to legal claims or where it is needed to protect your interests (or someone else’s interests) and you are not capable of giving your consent, or where you have already made the information public.
4. Protecting personal information
We use a variety of security technologies and procedures to help protect your personal information from unauthorised access and use.
We have appropriate security measures in place to prevent personal information from being accidentally lost or used or accessed in an unauthorised way. We limit access to your personal information to those who have a genuine business need to know it. Those processing your information will do so only in an authorised manner and are subject to a duty of confidentiality.
Access to the information you provide to us shall be restricted to authorised users only and is treated in the strictest confidence and shall only be used for the purposes described above.
5. Who is personal information shared with
We may have to share your data with other entities in the Specsavers group, third parties, including third-party service for example those who support our IT and communications system such as Microsoft as well as third party providers of our People Management Systems for the purposes to simplify and manage our people processes. In this case we will enter into a contract which obliges third parties to protect data in accordance with relevant data protection legislation.
We may transfer your personal information outside EU and UK. If we do, we will ensure an appropriate safeguard is in place and additional security measures are employed to protect your personal information.
6. How long is the information kept for
Personal information will be retained by Specsavers no longer than is necessary however we may be required by law (for example tax laws) to retain your personal information for a certain period.
7. Your rights regarding your personal information
You have certain rights under data protection legislation, including the option 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 situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground
- 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 are not satisfied with the processing, you also have the right to file a complaint to the national data authorities.
For those based in the European Union please see this link for information relating to supervisory authorities and how to contact them. For those based in the UK, the supervisory authority is the Information Commissioners Office and may be contacted via this link or by telephone on 0303 123 1113
To request any of the above rights, please enter your own profile recruitment- or employee profile or contact us at any time at Datapro*******@**ecsavers.com.
8. Where to find this privacy notice including updates
This privacy notice does not form part of any contract of employment or other contract to provide services. This privacy notice (and any potential future updates) is available on our intranet (Connect+ and Greenpoint) as well as a local language version on our country specific websites.
It is important that you read this notice, together with any other privacy notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal information about you, so that you are aware of how and why we are using such information and what your rights are under the data protection legislation.
9. Contact us
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact data protection team via Datapro*******@**ecsavers.com or write to our Data Protection Officer at our Legal Department, Specsavers Optical Group, La Villiaze, St Andrews, Guernsey, GY6 8YP
Published October 2023