Privacy

Profiles Creative Limited
Registered office : 1st Floor, 8-11 St John’s Lane, Farringdon, London, EC1M 4BF
VAT number : 807059433

Thanks for taking the time to look through our Privacy Policy.

Here at Profiles Creative, protecting your personal information is hugely important to us. When we say personal information (or “personal data”), we’re talking about information which can identify you as an individual, information we collect from you – and other people – in various ways.

The Data Protection Act 1998 (the "Act") and the General Data Protection Regulation 2018 (“GDPR”) has also placed some very specific obligations on us, obligations that refer to the way we handle this information.

This privacy policy is designed to let you know exactly what personal information we might hold on you now and what we may collect from you in the future (that might be when you apply for a job with us, when you use our website or when you contact us). We’ll also tell you how we store that information, how we use it, how you can access and manage it too.

And because personal information may be stored online, we wanted to tell you what we’ve done to keep it secure.

So, what personal information do we collect about you?

Here’s the personal data we usually hold on you…

Contact details
Identification information
Information about past and current employment
Education and qualifications
Special categories personal information. This involves data for the public interest, such as for equal opportunities monitoring. It might also include information we collect to assess your working capacity…on health grounds, for example. All “special category” data is the most sensitive and gets the highest possible level of protection.

In terms of process, we collect the information from your CV and portfolio, our application and contact forms as well as any comments you may include in free text fields – such as personal statements.

We might also keep any references we receive from any third parties (like the ones you give us, credit reference and fraud prevention agencies) as well as any other communication between us, whether that’s written, e-mailed, or as a result of visits, interviews or phone calls.

We might also collect any publicly available personal data from, for example, job boards, LinkedIn, or similar recruitment websites. Or we might use third-party applications which get their data from these publicly available websites.

We also monitor our site traffic and – like most websites – we use a Unique Visitor Cookie (managed by our carefully selected statistics provider) to identify your computer by using a random number (e.g. #12489). You’ll find more information on cookies and how you can disable them later in this policy.

Unless it's impractical, we’ll let you know if we obtain and store information from any other source and we’ll also tell you how we’ll use it.

What happens if you don’t supply us with this personal information?

It’s completely up to you which information you share with us and which information we hold onto. Rest assured, we’ll only use your personal information for the reason we collected it for in the first place unless there’s another reason which is legitimately connected with the original purpose.

If you decide not to give us certain information, we might not be able to carry out our contractual or legal responsibilities and obligations to you. That might include helping you secure employment, paying you, supplying accurate reporting data to HMRC or managing the health and safety of our workers.

How do we make sure your personal data is secure?

We always do our very best to protect your privacy although you’ll appreciate no data transmission over the internet is always completely secure. We can’t therefore completely guarantee the security of personal information you send to us, or any you input on our website. Any personal information you do send is at your own risk, but once we receive it, we have strict protocols that will protect it.

How do we use your personal information?

We may use your data in a number of different ways:

If it concerns a contract between you and us or an employer;

We might use your personal information if we need it in connection with – or anticipation of – a contract between you and us or an employer. We might use it to…

process your job application and manage the recruitment process
help potential employers assess your job application or to confirm references
check with the regulatory, industry or security authorities

If it’s in our legitimate business interest

We might also use your personal information for our legitimate business interests to…

help us identify you so we know who we’re talking to
help us keep accurate records of who we’ve introduced to our clients
help prevent fraud or loss
get in touch about opportunities you, or people in your network, might be interested in
assess risk, carry out market research, statistical analysis or test systems.
improve our process and your application (including quality assurance) and to analyse your application and recruitment history
train staff and monitor our services. This might include recording our conversations or correspondence to make sure we’re giving you a great service and to keep in line with legal and regulatory obligations

Where you’ve given consent

We might use your personal information to…

contact you by phone, email or any other way to let you know about interesting opportunities
let you know about job alerts
invite you to industry events or surveys and to participate in market research activity

If you want to withdraw your consent, simply log in to your account on the website and update your details. Or get in touch with our Data Protection Officer, Lee Cook, at lee@profilescreative.com.

Who do we share your personal information with?

We might share your personal information with the clients who work with us or use our website.

We’ll only share your personal information with third parties…

If we sell or buy any business or assets. We might need to disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer.
If Profiles Creative or almost all our assets are bought by a third party. Your personal data will then be one of the transferred assets.
If we have to share your personal data to someone for legal reasons. To enforce or apply our terms and conditions. Or to protect the rights, property, or safety of Profiles Creative staff, our customers or others.

How can you find out what personal information we hold on you?

You can see any personal information we hold on you any time – just write, email or phone. It’s known as a ‘subject access request’ (or ‘SAR’ for short) and get in touch by…

e-mailing us at lee@profilescreative.com with the words ‘Data Request’ in the heading
writing to us at 8-11 St John’s Lane, Farringdon, London, EC1M 4BF

Even if you don’t want a copy of your personal information, you can still get in touch to make sure the information we’ve got is accurate or to let us know of any changes. We always do our best to make sure the data we hold is accurate, up to date and relevant. If you do want to make any changes or there are inaccuracies, we will, of course, be happy to help.

Here are your data rights…

You can:

object to any legitimate business interests processing
withdraw consent (this only works for any processing that depends on consent)
ask for your data to be updated or corrected (where it’s wrong)
contest any decision and ask for a human intervention if we’ve carried out automated decision making
exercise your right to be forgotten
ask for a copy of any information you’ve supplied electronically (such as your CV) in a portable format
complain to the ICO

How long do we hold and use your information for?

Unless we let you know otherwise, we’ll hold and use data about contractual and legitimate interests indefinitely. Any data we get via active consent will carry on being used for marketing that relates to your initial opt-in, until we hear you want to unsubscribe or opt-out.

If we no longer believe there is a shared legitimate interest for us to hold your data, we’ll only keep your personal information for as long as we need it to do the job we collected it for in the first place. That might be to meet legal, accounting, or reporting obligations, for example.

When it comes to deciding which data we should keep, we look at the amount, nature and sensitivity of the information, the risk of any harm from unauthorised use, legal requirements, the reasons we collected it and whether we can do the job in any other way.

We might sometimes anonymise your personal information so you can’t be recognised. If so, we may use this information without letting you know. Once you’re no longer a worker, contractor or candidate of the company – or someone working at a clients or potential client of ours – we’ll retain and securely destroy your information in line with laws and regulations.

So, what are cookies? And why do we use them?

Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to your device when you visit a website, usually kept in temporary Internet folders on your PC. They're useful since they record the way you use our site and help us to get to know you better.

It means, for example, that we can recognise you when you return to the site and remember your preferences…and that means we can give you a more personal service and speed up your searches.

Of course, you don’t have to accept cookies. Most browsers help you refuse cookies through a setting on your browser’s menu. However, if you do select this setting, it might mean you can’t access certain parts of our site.

Please remember that unless you change your browser settings, our system will issue cookies when you log on.

So how do cookies work?

Cookies are sent back to the original website on any subsequent visit or if you go to another website that recognises that cookie.

Handy little things, cookies do a lot of jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, remembering your preferences, and generally improving your website experience. They’ll also make sure the ads you see online are more relevant.

There are four kinds of cookies…

Category 1: strictly necessary cookies
Category 2: performance cookies
Category 3: functionality cookies
Category 4: targeting cookies or advertising cookies

Category 1 - Strictly necessary cookies
These are critical to help you move around the site and use its features, like accessing secure areas. Without these cookies, some services – like registering for job alerts – simply can’t be provided. This is the kind of cookie our site uses.

Category 2 - Performance cookies
These collect information about how you use a website – like the pages you go to most often – but not information that identifies you. They collect anonymous, aggregated data that’s used to boost website performance. By using our website and online services, you agree that we can place these cookies on your device.

Category 3 - Functionality cookies
These cookies allow the website to remember any choices you’ve made (like user name and password) and provide a host of enhanced, more personal features. They’ll also remember any changes you’ve made to text size, fonts and other parts of the website as well as providing a service you’ve asked for, like watching a video or commenting on a blog. Collecting information anonymously, these cookies can’t track your browsing on other websites. Again, when you
use our website or online services, you’ll agree that we can place these cookies on your device.

Category 4 - targeting cookies or advertising cookies
These cookies are used to deliver adverts more relevant to you. They also limit the number of times you see an ad as well as measuring the effectiveness of the ads you do see. They remember that you’ve visited a website too, and that information is sometimes shared with other organisations such as advertisers. Often targeting or advertising cookies are linked to functions on the site that other organisations provide.

We do post links to other websites and once you visit another site through one of these links, that site should explain how they use cookies on their site.

You’ll find out more about cookies by visiting www.allaboutcookies.org or www.youronlinechoices.eu. Google has a short video too.

External links from our site

From time to time, we might include hypertext links to sites created by individuals and companies outside our group – this usually happens when there’s something particularly relevant to the topic you're reading about. We do our best to check that the content of these sites is suitable but we can’t take any responsibility for the companies who publish the sites that we link to, or the integrity of the content.

What if we update our privacy policy?

We constantly review our privacy policies, so please check each time you visit our site. You'll read about any changes on this page as soon as they happen.

What does it cost to see my personal information?

Access to your personal information (or to exercise any of the other rights) is completely free although we might charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded or excessive. We might even refuse to comply with the request.

Any questions? Feel that we’re not complying with the terms of this privacy policy? Please do contact us by e-mailing us at lee@profilescreative.com with ‘Privacy Policy Grievance’ in the heading.