Privacy Notice - Applicants (Senior Members)

How we use your personal information - Candidates for election to College memberships

This statement explains how Magdalene College (“the College”, “we” and “our”) handles and uses information we collect about applicants (“you” and “your”) for senior memberships and Fellowships.  In broad terms, we use your information to manage your application to the College and our subsequent recruitment or election processes.

The controller for your personal information is the Magdalene College, Cambridge CB3 0AG. The person within the College otherwise responsible for data protection at the time of issue, and the person who is responsible for monitoring compliance with relevant legislation in relation to the protection of personal information, is the Assistant Bursar assistant.bursar@magd.cam.ac.uk. This is the same address to contact if you want to exercise any of your data protection rights, including requesting copies of personal data the College holds about you.

The Data Protection Officer for the College is Intercollegiate Services Ltd (ISL), 64 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR; email: college.dpo@isl.colleges.cam.ac.uk. ISL should be contacted if you have any concerns about how the College is managing your personal information, or if you require advice on how to exercise your rights as outlined in this statement.

The legal basis for processing your personal information is that it is necessary either in order for you to enter into an employment contract with us, or for you to enter into membership of the College, where you will be subject to the College’s governing documents.

How your data is used by the College

Your information is used by us for in the first instance solely for the purposes of considering your suitability for employment or election and for us to manage our recruitment processes, including our monitoring of equality and diversity within the College.

If you have concerns or queries about any of these purposes, or how we communicate with you, please contact us at the address given below.

The College holds the following personal information relating to you, in line with the purposes above:

A* personal details, including name, contact details (phone, email, postal);

B* your application form and associated information submitted by you at that time;

C other information relating to your recruitment /election (including references we take up as part of the recruitment process, any pre-employment or pre-election assessment of you, and any assessment of you at an informal or formal interview);

D any occupational health assessments and/or medical information you have provided, and related work requirements;

E* evidence of your right to work in the UK (e.g. copies of your passport);

F* information relating to your age, nationality, gender;

G any correspondence relating to the outcome of the recruitment/election process (either successful or unsuccessful).

Those marked with an * relate to information provided by you.  Other information is generated by us or, where self-evident, provided by a third party.

We will not access personal information about you from social media sites, unless there is a legitimate interest for us to do so (for example, the role you have applied for has a significant public-facing element to it, or is involved with publicity and presenting us to the general public).  Consequently, we do not routinely screen applicants’ social media profiles but, if aspects of your social media profile are brought to our attention and give rise to concerns about your suitability for the role in question, we may need to consider them.  Our social media guidelines are available via our website at: Policies and Procedures | Magdalene College.

For certain posts, we may use the Disclosure and Barring Services (DBS) and Disclosure Scotland to help assess your suitability for certain positions of trust.  If this is the case, we will make this clear to you in separate correspondence.  Certificate and status check information is only used for this specific purpose, and we comply fully with the DBS code of Practice regarding the correct use, handling, storage, retention and destruction of certificates and certificate information. We recognise that it is a criminal offence to pass this information on to anyone who is not entitled to receive it.

Who we share your data with

On occasion, as part of the recruitment/election process, the interview panel may include members who are external to the College. When this is the case we share relevant personal information with external panel members. Information is not shared with other third parties without your written consent.  Generally, personal information is not shared outside of the European Economic Area.

If you are successful in your application, the information is subsequently held as part of your employment or membership record with us.

Subject to the type of membership, if you are unsuccessful in your application, we generally retain all information for no more than twelve months after the closing date of the application process.  If relevant we may retain your personal details in order to contact you regarding College activities or membership.

If you are successful in your application and the post has required a “resident market test” (needed if the post is open to applicants from outside the European Union), the College will retain your application records for the duration of the sponsored post and twelve months thereafter.

Your rights

You have the right: to ask us for access to, rectification or erasure of your information; to restrict processing (pending correction or deletion); and to ask for the transfer of your information electronically to a third party (data portability).  Some of these rights are not automatic, and we reserve the right to discuss with you why we might not comply with a request from you to exercise them.

Failure to provide the information reasonably requested of you may result in an automatic disqualification from the recruitment process.

You retain the right at all times to lodge a complaint about our management of your personal information with the Information Commissioner’s Office at Make a complaint about how an organisation has used your personal information | ICO.