Job seeker data is now an exceptionally valuable commodity in today’s increasingly competitive hiring market. In the recruitment industry, candidate experience is discussed frequently but the rights that candidates should have over their experiences is less so. Job hunting is a job in itself, and candidates need all the help they can get to curate career paths and find themselves at the right companies. Job seekers place a lot of trust in recruiters and potential employers to handle their personal information considerately and prudently during the hiring process.
Recruiters today should pay particular attention to the methods by which they process, store, and use candidate data. By not being responsible and transparent about their data practices, recruiters risk deterring job seekers.
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) tackles these privacy concerns head-on by stipulating and reinforcing online user rights, including those of job candidates. The policy adds more transparency around data management and stipulates stronger consent from data subjects (e.g., your job applicants). Under the GDPR, the requirements of recruiters and employers (data controllers) and software providers (data processors) are much clearer and enforceable — which is important.
To protect your brand and safeguard that applicants perceive your company as ethical and forward-looking, it’s best to begin implementing some of the GDPR’s specified data practices within your hiring program — soon.
The main concept behind candidate data rights is to enable job seekers to choose who has access to their personal information, to have discernibility into where that data is stored and how it is handled, and to provide informed consent to be collected into a database. Within a recruitment platform, recruiters can carry out candidate searches with criteria based on location, date, and/or source, easily generating lists of candidates that may need to be deleted or purged from the system to conform to regulations. You can also send communications to your candidate database that ask applicants to return to the career portal to give consent, review their information, and request deletion or edits of their personal data.
While these modifications may seem relatively simplistic, they carry a lot of implication. Remember, there is a person behind every bit of data. Permit them to fully partake in the whole hiring procedure, empower their choices, and demonstrate how valued they really are.
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