PRIVACY POLICY FOR JOB APPLICANTSSS

As part of any recruitment process, the relevant company in the Northern Powergrid group collects and processes personal information relating to job applicants. We will only use the personal information provided as part of a recruitment process in accordance with this privacy policy. Please read our privacy policy carefully. We take the privacy of all job applicants very seriously and are committed to protecting your privacy.

This privacy policy explains how we may obtain personal information about job applicants and how we will process that personal information from time to time.

We refer to the company or companies in the Northern Powergrid group that is or are conducting the recruitment exercise as “Northern Powergrid”, “we” or “us”, as appropriate, in this privacy policy.

WHY WE COLLECT PERSONAL INFORMATION ABOUT YOU, THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT AND HOW WE USE THAT INFORMATION

We collect and use personal information about job applicants in order to conduct our recruitment processes including:

• i) Name, address and contact details;
• ii) Details of your qualifications, skills, experience and employment history;
• iii) Information about your current level of remuneration, including benefit entitlements;
• iv) Whether or not you have a disability for which we need to make reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process;
• v) Information required to evidence your identity;
• vi) Information about your entitlement to work in the UK, if appropriate; and
• vii) Details of any unspent criminal convictions you may have that either you have given to us or have been obtained via a basic Disclosure and Barring Service check.

We may collect this personal information in a variety of ways, for example, from information contained in application forms, CVs or resumes, your passport or other identity documents, or through interviews or other forms of assessment, including online tests, where applicable.

We may also collect personal information from third parties, such as references supplied by former employers, information from employment background check providers and information from criminal records checks. We will seek such information from third parties only once a job offer has been made.

We need to process your personal information in order to take steps prior to entering into a contract of employment with you and if we are to make an offer and so enter into an employment contract with you on conclusion of the job application process.

In some cases, we may need to process your personal information to ensure that we are complying with legal obligations placed upon us, including under our electricity distribution licence, for example if we are required to check a successful applicant's identity and/or eligibility to work in the UK before employment starts and to ensure our colleagues are fit and proper to visit and enter customers’ premises where their roles may involve doing so.

We may process special categories of personal data, such as information contained in your passport, for identity-proofing purposes where applicable, and about your ethnic origin, sexual orientation or religion, to monitor recruitment statistics. We may also collect personal information about whether or not applicants are disabled so that we can make reasonable adjustments for candidates who have a disability. We process such information to carry out our obligations and exercise specific rights in relation to employment law.

For some roles, we will seek information about criminal convictions and offences from the Disclosure and Barring Service. Where we do so, it is because it is necessary for us to carry out our obligations and exercise specific rights in relation to employment law and under our electricity distribution licence.

Your information may be shared internally and between companies in the Northern Powergrid group for the purposes of the recruitment exercise, including to members of the People and People Services teams, appropriate line managers, managers in the business area in which you may work, the executive and senior management teams and IT staff, if access to your personal information is necessary for performance of their roles.

We will not use your personal information for any purpose other than for the recruitment exercise in respect of the job for which you have applied. If your application for employment is unsuccessful, we will hold your personal information on file for six months after the end of the relevant recruitment process. At the end of that period, your personal information will be deleted or destroyed.

If your application for employment is successful, any personal information gathered during the recruitment process will be transferred to your personal file and retained in accordance with our retention and destruction of records policy during and after your employment with us.

We consider that we have a legitimate interest in processing personal information obtained during the recruitment process and for keeping records of that process. Processing personal information from job applicants allows us to manage the recruitment process, assess and confirm an applicant's suitability for employment and decide to whom to offer a job. We may also need to process personal information from job applicants to respond to and defend against legal claims.

You are under no statutory or contractual obligation to provide us with your personal information during the recruitment process. However, if you do not provide that information, we may not be able to process your application properly or at all.

PROTECTION OF YOUR INFORMATION

We maintain stringent security measures designed to protect your personal information. These measures include adhering to various security standards, following certain procedures, physical and technological protection and asking you for proof of identity before we disclose your personal information to you, where appropriate.

We may, in limited circumstances, transfer your personal data to a specialist service provider for confirmation of our identity-proofing checks. That service provider has appropriate technical and organisational measures in place to ensure the security of the personal data and we have entered into a contract with the service provider which contains the data processing terms required by the General Data Protection Regulation.

TRANSFERRING PERSONAL INFORMATION INTERNATIONALLY

We may need to transfer some personal information to organisations that are outside of the UK, for example to our outsourced IT Infrastructure Services providers or to other organisations for hosting purposes. We will ensure that such transfers are either to countries in respect of which the UK has made an adequacy decision or there are appropriate safeguards in place to protect that information, including at least one of the safeguards required by data protection law. We transfer personal data to our outsourced IT Infrastructure Services provider in India using such appropriate safeguards.

Otherwise, we will not transfer your personal information to a third party outside of the UK unless you have confirmed to us that you are happy for us to do so.

CONTACTING US AND YOUR RIGHTS

The controller of your personal information is the company in the Northern Powergrid group to which you have applied for a job, as appropriate.

If you would like to contact us about how we process your personal information, you can do so by contacting our Data Protection Officer, whose details are:

John Elliott
Head of Regulatory Compliance
Northern Powergrid
Lloyds Court
78 Grey Street
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 6AF

Subject to certain conditions, you have the right to:

• i) Access your personal information;
• ii) Have your personal information rectified or erased;

• iii) Restrict our processing of your personal information;

• iv) Object to our processing of your personal information; and

• v) The portability of your personal information e.g. to receive that information in a “machinereadable format”.

If we process any of your personal information based on you having given us consent to do so, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time. However, this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing we may have undertaken based on your consent before it is withdrawn;

Our recruitment processes are not usually based solely on automated decision-making. We will advise you accordingly, if we are to use any automated decision-making for the purposes of processing your job application.

You have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office about the way in which we process your personal information. You may do so by using the “Make a complaint” button on the Information Commissioner’s website at https://ico.org.uk/ or by writing to:

• Information Commissioner's Office
• Wycliffe House
• Water Lane
• Wilmslow
• Cheshire
• SK9 5AF