Privacy

How we handle your application

This explains what happens to the information you send us when you apply for a role here, and what you can ask us to do about it.

Who holds it

IWS Online School LTD, company number 14794517, of 167-169 Great Portland Street, 5th Floor, London, W1W 5PF. We’re the data controller for anything you send through this site. To ask us anything about it, email dpo@iwschool.co.ukor write to that address.

What we collect

Only what the form asks for: your name and contact details, where you’re based, links to your work and, if it’s private, how to get in, your answers about your experience and how you think, what notice you’d need, whether the fee and contractor terms work for you, and whether you can work as a contractor where you are. If you tell us you need an adjustment to take part, we use that to arrange it and nothing else.

We don’t ask for your date of birth, your nationality, your salary history, or anything about your health. If you send us any of that anyway, we don’t use it to make a decision.

Why we’re allowed to

We rely on legitimate interests: we have a role to fill and you’ve applied for it. That’s the basis ourPrivacy Policy & Data Protection Noticesets out for recruitment, and it covers applicants as well as staff. You can object to that, and if you do we’ll stop and tell you what it means for your application.

If you tick the optional future-roles box on the form, we keep your application for longer on the basis of your consent instead. See below.

Who sees it

The people hiring for the role, and nobody else: our Marketing Manager, the consultant running the process, our Operations Lead and our CEO. We don’t sell it, we don’t share it with other employers, and we don’t use it for marketing.

Two suppliers handle it on our behalf and do nothing else with it. Cloudflare hosts this site and carries your application to us, and Google Workspace runs the mailbox it arrives in. We also hold applications in an internal IWS recruitment tool for as long as the process is running, so that everyone above is working from the same place.

Where it goes

We’re in the UK and so is your application. Both suppliers above are US-headquartered, so their staff may be able to reach it from outside the UK for support and maintenance. That’s covered by the data protection terms in our contracts with them, which hold them to UK standards wherever the data is.

Nothing here is decided by a machine

No part of this is automated. Nobody is scored, ranked or filtered by software, and every decision about your application is made by a person reading it.

How long we keep it

If you’re not offered the role, we keep your application for 6 months from the date we make our decision, then delete it securely, unless there’s a specific, justified reason to keep it longer. If you’d rather we didn’t keep it at all once we’ve made a decision, say so and we’ll delete it.

The one exception is the optional future-roles box at the end of the form. If you tick it, we keep your application for up to 12 months so we can consider you for suitable roles later. It’s your choice, it has no bearing on this application, and you can withdraw it at any time by emailing dpo@iwschool.co.uk. We’ll then delete it, or keep it only for the standard 6 months if that hasn’t run out yet.

What this site stores on your device

Very little. Cloudflare, which hosts this site, checks that visitors are people rather than bots. To do that it sets one security cookie, and when you send the form it runs a quick check that loads from Cloudflare. It’s there to stop fake applications and it’s strictly necessary. We don’t use it for anything else.

Apart from that, nothing is stored unless you ask for it. The box on the form markedkeep my answers on this device while I finish saves your draft in your own browser so you don’t lose twenty minutes of writing. It never leaves your device, we can’t see it, and unticking the box deletes it straight away.

You can tell us to stop

Because we rely on legitimate interests, you have the right to object to us handling your application at all, at any point, and you don’t have to give a reason. Tell us and we’ll stop, delete what we hold, and confirm we’ve done it. It costs nothing and there’s no form for it. The only consequence is that we can’t carry on considering you for the role.

What you can ask for

A copy of what we hold, a correction, deletion, a restriction on what we do with it, or a portable copy. Email dpo@iwschool.co.uk and we’ll do it. If you think we’ve got it wrong you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk, though we’d rather you came to us first so we can put it right.