Privacy Policy

Privacy Notice

Hamilton Barnes Associates Limited (”We”) are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.

This notice sets out the obligations of Hamilton Barnes Associates Limited regarding data protection and the rights of current or prospective candidates, clients, employees, consultants, suppliers and temporary workers (“data subjects”) in respect of the collection, provision and processing of personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The GDPR (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) is a new regulation which replaces the Data Protection Regulation (Directive 95/46/EC). The Regulation aims to harmonise data protection legislation across EU member states, enhancing privacy rights for individuals and providing a strict framework within which commercial organisations can legally operate. 

The GDPR defines “personal data” as any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (a “data subject”); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier, or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural, or social identity of that natural person.

Even though the UK has expressed its intention to leave the EU in March 2019, the GDPR will be applicable in the UK from 25th May 2018. The Government intends for the GDPR to continue in UK law post Brexit and has also introduced a Data Protection Bill to replace the current Data Protection Act in due course.

Your new rights under the GDPR are set out in this notice but will only apply once the GDPR becomes law on 25th May 2018.

We are committed to the correct, lawful, and fair handling of all personal data, respecting the legal rights, privacy, and trust of all individuals we deal with. Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data and how we will treat it.

For the purposes of data protection legislation in force from 25th May 2018 the data controller is Hamilton Barnes Associates Limited of New Liverpool House, 15 Eldon Street, London, EC2M 7LD. Our nominated Data Privacy Manager is Nick Barker.

Who we are and what we do

We are a recruitment agency and recruitment business as defined in the Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 (our business). We also provide the following other services: consultancy. We collect the personal data of the following types of people to allow us to undertake our business:

Prospective and placed candidates for permanent or temporary roles;

Prospective and live client contacts;

Supplier contacts to support our services;

Employees, consultants, temporary workers;

Prospective employees, consultants and temporary workers.

We collect information about you to carry out our core business and ancillary activities.

Information you give to us or we collect about you.

This is information about you that you give us by filling in forms on www.hamilton-barnes.co.uk (our site) or by corresponding with us by phone, e-mail or otherwise. It includes information you provide when you register your details on our site, apply for one of our advertised vacancies, enter our database, subscribe to our services, attend our events, participate in discussion boards or other social media functions on our site, enter a competition, promotion or survey and when you report a problem with our site. 

The information you give us or we collect about you may include your name, address, private and corporate e-mail address and phone number, financial information, compliance documentation and references verifying your qualifications and experience and your right to work in the United Kingdom, curriculum vitae and photograph, links to your professional profiles available in the public domain e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, business Facebook or corporate website.

Information we collect about you when you visit our website. 

With regard to each of your visits to our site we will automatically collect information as detailed in our Cookie Policy.

Information we obtain from other sources. 

This is information we obtain about you from other sources such as LinkedIn, corporate websites, job board websites, online CV libraries, your business card, personal recommendations, and social media profiles. In this case we will inform you, by sending you this privacy notice, within a maximum of 30 days of collecting the data of the fact we hold personal data about you, what data we hold, the source the personal data originates from and whether it came from publicly accessible sources and for what purpose we intend to retain and process your personal data.

We are working closely with third parties including companies we recruit for, business partners, sub-contractors in technical, professional, payment and other services, advertising networks, analytics providers, search information providers, credit reference agencies and professional advisors. We may receive information about you from them for the purposes of our recruitment services and ancillary support services. This information may include your name, private and corporate e-mail address and phone number, references verifying your qualifications and experience and links to your professional profiles available in the public domain e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, business Facebook or corporate website.

3.1 Purposes of the processing and the legal basis for the processing

We use information held about you in the following ways:

To carry out our obligations arising from any contracts we intend to enter into or have entered into between you and us and to provide you with the information, products and services that you request from us or we think will be of interest to you because it is relevant to your career or to your organisation.

To provide you with information about other goods and services we offer that are similar to those that you have already purchased, been provided with or enquired about.  

The core service we offer to our candidates and clients is the introduction of candidates to our clients for the purpose of temporary or permanent engagement.  However, our service expands to supporting individuals throughout their career and to supporting businesses’ resourcing needs and strategies.

Our legal basis for the processing of personal data is our legitimate business interests, described in more detail below, although we will also rely on contract, legal obligation and consent for specific uses of data.

We will rely on contract if we are negotiating or have entered into a placement agreement with you or your organisation or any other contract to provide services to you or receive services from you or your organisation.

We will rely on legal obligation if we are legally required to hold information on you to fulfil our legal obligations.

We will in some circumstances rely on consent for particular uses of your data and you will be asked for your express consent, if legally required. Examples of when consent may be the lawful basis for processing include permission to introduce you to a client (if you are a candidate).

3.2 Our Legitimate Business Interests

Our legitimate interests in collecting and retaining your personal data is described below:

As a recruitment business and recruitment agency we introduce candidates to clients for permanent employment, temporary worker placements or independent professional contracts.  The exchange of personal data of our candidates and our client contacts is a fundamental and essential part of this process. 

In order to support our candidates’ career aspirations and our clients’ resourcing needs we require a database of candidate and client personal data containing historical information as well as current resourcing requirements. 

To maintain, expand and develop our business we need to record the personal data of prospective candidates and client contacts. This information may include your name, address, private and corporate e-mail address and phone number, financial information, compliance documentation and references verifying your qualifications and experience and your right to work in the United Kingdom, curriculum vitae and photograph, links to your professional profiles available in the public domain e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, business Facebook or corporate website.

To deliver our ancillary services we need to retain data which may include your financial information, curriculum vitae, corporate address, feedback from interviews and hiring statistics.

 3.3 Legal Obligation

Should we want or need to rely on legal obligation to lawfully process your data, we will notify you in writing. 

In order to verify your identity and right to work in the UK or EU, we may be required to process a copy of your driver’s licence, passport or right to work documentation. This will only be the case if you have secured an offer of employment after using our services, and is not part of our typical practice prior to, or during the application process.

 3.4 Consent

Should we want or need to rely on consent to lawfully process your data we will request your consent orally, by email or by an online process for the specific activity we require consent for and record your response on our system. Where consent is the lawful basis for our processing you have the right to withdraw your consent to this particular processing at any time.

3.5 Other Uses we will make of your data:

Use of our website:

to notify you about changes to our service;

to ensure that content from our site is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer.

We will use this information:

to administer our site and for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research, statistical and survey purposes;

to improve our site to ensure that content is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer;

to allow you to participate in interactive features of our service, when you choose to do so;

as part of our efforts to keep our site safe and secure;

to measure or understand the effectiveness of advertising we serve to you and others, and to deliver relevant advertising to you;

to make suggestions and recommendations to you and other users of our site about goods or services that may interest you or them.

We do not undertake automated decision making or profiling. We do use our computer systems to search and identify personal data in accordance with parameters set by a person. A person will always be involved in the decision-making process.

4. Cookies  

Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our site. For 

detailed information on the cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them see our Cookie Policy.

 5. Disclosure of your information inside and outside of the EEA

We will share your personal information with:

Selected third parties including:

clients for the purpose of introducing candidates to them;

candidates for the purpose of arranging interviews and engagements;

clients, business partners, suppliers and sub-contractors for the performance and compliance obligations of any contract we enter into with them or you;

subcontractors including business advisers, email marketing specialists, event organisers, payment and other financial service providers

analytics and search engine providers that assist us in the improvement and optimisation of our site;

credit reference agencies, our insurance broker, compliance partners and other sub-contractors for the purpose of assessing your suitability for a role where this is a condition of us entering into a contract with you.

We will disclose your personal information to third parties:

In the event that we sell or buy any business or assets, in which case we will disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets.

If Hamilton Barnes Associates Limited or substantially all of its assets are acquired by a third party, in which case personal data held by it about its customers will be one of the transferred assets.

If we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or other agreements; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of Hamilton Barnes Associates Limited, our customers, or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.

The lawful basis for the third-party processing will include:

Their own legitimate business interests in processing your personal data, in most cases to fulfil their internal resourcing needs;

satisfaction of their contractual obligations to us as our data processor;

for the purpose of a contract in place or in contemplation;

to fulfil their legal obligations.

6. Where we store and process your personal data  

The data that we collect from you may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the European Economic Area (”EEA”). It may be transferred to third parties outside of the EEA for the purpose of our recruitment services. It may also be processed by staff operating outside the EEA who work for us or for one of our suppliers. This includes staff engaged in, among other things, our recruitment services and the provision of support services. By submitting your personal data, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing. 

We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your personal data is treated securely and protected against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction or damage, in accordance with this privacy notice.

All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers. Any payment transactions will be encrypted using SSL technology.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our site; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.

7. Retention of your data

We understand our legal duty to retain accurate data and only retain personal data for as long as we need it for our legitimate business interests and that you are happy for us to do so. Accordingly, we have a data retention notice and run data routines to remove data that we no longer have a legitimate business interest in maintaining.

We do the following to try to ensure our data is accurate:

Prior to making an introduction we check that we have accurate information about you;

We keep in touch with you so you can let us know of changes to your personal data;

We use reasonable sources, e.g. LinkedIn, corporate websites and job board websites to verify and update data.

Where any inaccurate or out-of-date data is found, all reasonable steps will be taken immediately to amend or erase that data, as appropriate.

We segregate our data so that we keep different types of data for different time periods.  The criteria we use to determine whether we should retain your personal data includes: the nature of the personal data; its perceived accuracy; whether it enables us to effectively deliver the information, products and services that you request from us or we think will be of interest to you because it is relevant to your career or to your organisation; our legal obligations;

whether an interview or placement has been arranged; and our recruitment expertise and knowledge of the industry by location, sector and job role.

We may archive part or all of your personal data or retain it on our financial systems only, deleting all or part of it from our main Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) system. We may pseudonymise parts of your data, particularly following a request for suppression or deletion of your data, to ensure that we do not re-enter your personal data on to our database, unless requested to do so.

For your information, Pseudonymised Data is created by taking identifying fields within a database and replacing them with artificial identifiers, or pseudonyms.

Our current retention notice is available upon request.

8.1 Your rights  

You have the right to ask us not to process your personal data for marketing purposes. We will usually inform you (before collecting your data) if we intend to use your data for such purposes or if we intend to disclose your information to any third party for such purposes and we will collect express consent from you if legally required prior to using your personal data for marketing purposes.

You can exercise your right to accept or prevent such processing by checking certain boxes on the forms we use to collect your data. You can also exercise the right at any time by contacting our Data Privacy Officer, Nick Barker, at nick@hamilton-barnes.co.uk.

Our site may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of our partner networks, advertisers and affiliates. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

8.2 The GDPR provides you with the following rights. To:

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 in certain formats, if practicable.

Make a complaint to a supervisory body which in the United Kingdom is the Information Commissioner’s Office. The ICO can be contacted through this link:  https://ico.org.uk/concerns/ 

8.3 Access to information  

The Data Protection Act 1998 and the GDPR give you the right to access information held about you.  We also encourage you to contact us to ensure your data is accurate and complete.

Your right of access can be exercised in accordance with the Act (and the GDPR once it is in force). Hamilton Barnes Associates Limited is normally required to respond to a Subject Access Request (SAR) within one month of receipt, however this can be extended by up to two months in the case of complex and/or numerous requests, and in such cases we will inform you of the need for extension. A SAR should be submitted to nick@hamilton-barnes.co.uk.  

Prior to 25th May 2018 any access request under the Data Protection Act will be subject to a fee of £10 to meet our costs in providing you with details of the information we hold about you. No fee will apply once the GDPR comes into force.