Privacy Policy

This policy explains how we process personal data within our business delivering search, consulting and assessment services, including how it affects our website: www.starfishsearch.com

1. Who we are

We are Starfish Search Limited. Further information about our firm and our offices can be found by clicking here. 

Starfish Search Limited (“we”, “us”) is committed to keeping your information secure and managing it in accordance with our legal responsibilities, under the privacy and data protection laws applicable wherever we operate in the world, as well as the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (“GDPR”) in the European Union (“EU”). 

For the purposes of data protection, we are the data controller and we will process your personal data in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679.

We keep this Privacy Policy under regular review and update it from time to time. By using our website, liaising with Starfish Search Limited or one of our consultants you are consenting to the terms of this privacy policy.

This policy was last updated in November 2020. Please review this policy periodically for any changes.

2. Who this policy applies to

We provide executive search, assessment and leadership services, interim managers and independent consultants (“our services”) to a range of clients. Details of our services can be found elsewhere on this website. This policy applies to you whether you are a candidate for one of our clients, an individual we are assessing as an employee of one of our clients, a client or whether you are a source or a referee in respect of a candidate or an employee of one of our clients.

Additionally, this policy will apply to you if you attend one of our events or have subscribed to receive information about our services or any of our marketing materials.

For the purposes of this policy:

  • candidate(s) means an individual who is a candidate, applicant, potential candidate, employee of a client;
  • client(s) means any, business, firm, organisation, government body or individual that mandates us to perform any of our services;
  • a referee is a person who provides a personal or work reference in respect of a candidate and;
  • a source is a person who provides us with information or intelligence about a candidate.

3. Gathering information

Our clients expect that we identify the best individuals to fill roles within their organisations. So, we need to research systems, online databases and other information sources, and talk to many individuals. Besides our clients, these will include referees and sources to help inform our decision-making process.

The nature of our work means we are required to process personal data quickly, confidentially and often without reference to the data subject. Accordingly, we process such data in accordance with the Data Protection Laws, regularly using our legitimate interest where it is not possible or feasible to speak directly with the data subject. Beyond this, consent will be sought for sensitive categories of data as detailed in Section 6, otherwise for general business processing of data we will rely on legitimate interest or performance of a contract.

We collect information from candidates directly when you send us your CV or resume to us via email or post. We also collect information from you when you speak with a Starfish Search Limited employee in any office. We may collect information about your device, including where available your Internet Protocol address, for reasons of fraud protection. We may also collect information about your device’s operating system and browser type, for system administration and to report aggregate information to our advertisers. This is statistical data about our users’ browsing actions and patterns, and does not identify any individual.

4. How we use your personal data

Candidate

We use the personal data we collect from you for a number of purposes:

  • Processing job applications, in partnership with our clients, on whose behalf we are instructed to help fill a job vacancy. This means that if you apply for a specific job, we may pass your details to the relevant client to proceed with the application. As a result, you may receive further direct correspondence from them.
  • Searching for relevant candidates for confidential recruitment assignments where our client is not initially named. This means that if we believe you are suitable for a specific role, we may pass your basic details on to the relevant client. If that client agrees that you might be suitable, we will then discuss this with you in more detail. You might be interviewed for the role by one of our consultants. If successful, you might be shortlisted for interview by our client. At this point, we will pass further details to the client and you may receive further direct correspondence from them. By applying for a role with Starfish Search Limited if we progress your application we will be required to pass some data on to our clients, and by applying for a role with us you consent to that data being passed to our clients.
  • From time to time we may send you information for marketing purposes which we think may be of interest. This may include information on our services, newsletters, events, webinars etc. Please note you may opt out from receipt of these marketing materials at any time by emailing us at info@starfishsearch.com with the Subject Header Marketing Information Opt Out.
  • For the performance of a contract, we have concluded with you as an individual, most likely an assessment or coaching programme.

We will only use your information in accordance with this Policy, or where we are required or authorised by law to disclose your information to others or, have your permission to do so.

Please be aware that we are not responsible for the data processing activities of others, such as our clients.

Client

We will use client data to perform our services to you and other legitimate business purposes such as marketing.

Source and Referee

We will use source and referee data to perform our services to enable us to obtain your opinions on a candidate.

5. The type of personal data we collect and process

In all cases, we collect and process personal data about you, including your name, address, telephone number and email address. If you do not provide the personal data necessary, or if you withdraw your consent for the processing of your personal data, we may not be able to proceed with an application on your behalf.

Candidate

If you proceed with a job application, or should we consult you about a role, you may be required to submit additional personal data. For example, date of birth, education and career history and curriculum vitae (CV), or resume. Your CV or resume may contain employment history, education, professional qualifications, memberships, details of papers written, references and referees, amongst other things.

Based on your explicit consent, we will also process any relevant psychometric assessments, psychological tests, or results from such assessments or tests.

From time to time, we may ask you to provide information relating to protected characteristics, such as your race or marital status. We do this for equal opportunity monitoring purposes and from time to time online, but only if that’s admissible under local law. This information is always anonymised and aggregated and will not be revealed to third parties without your specific consent.

We might also collect personal data from third-party databases and other public sources.

Client

As well as basic contact information we will also collect information about your role and other information provided to us by your organisation.

Source and Referee

As well as basic contact information we will also collect information regarding your credentials as a source, details of your relationship/knowledge of a candidate and your opinions of that individual.  We may obtain this information directly from you or publicly available information.

What we do

For certain roles, we may run an advertisement to which you may respond, either electronically or via mail. Other roles may involve one of our researchers or consultants calling you to discuss the details. Then, we will either inform you verbally that we will process your personal data or send you a Data Privacy Notice.  Both will direct you to this Privacy Policy.

Besides filling leadership vacancies, we also process personal data when we conduct market intelligence exercises to map out particular business sectors or functions to help clients understand the available talent.

6. Sensitive data

From time to time, we will seek your consent to process personal data in respect of certain specific and limited purposes. We will always do this before processing any sensitive personal data: racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, data concerning health or sex life and sexual orientation, genetic and/or biometric data. We encourage you not to provide us with sensitive personal data unless it is specifically requested, and we have your consent.

In some locations, we provide services to individuals, such as assessment and coaching. Here, we will process personal data for the performance of the contract with you. If our services include any psychometric assessments or psychological tests, we will obtain your specific consent.

7. Providing information to others

To help us run this website, and to provide executive search services or assessment services in certain countries, we work closely with trusted partners with whom we need to share personal data. These partners include:

  • Our clients, for whom we provide executive search services.
  • Our clients, for whom we provide assessment and coaching of their employees in certain countries.
  • Prospective clients, where we might need to demonstrate an understanding of a particular market and the individuals that work within it.

We will share information only as anticipated within this Privacy Policy and, wherever appropriate, limit disclosure to information in aggregated form, to avoid or limit identifying you personally.

Where we share information with such a third party, you will not be contacted by them, unless we have obtained your prior consent.

8. Third parties

We may also provide information to third party service providers who process information on our behalf. This is to help run some of our internal business operations, including email distribution, IT services and customer services. As part of our agreements with them, these third parties are required to process such data securely and only in accordance with our instructions. 

Your information may also be shared with organisations located elsewhere in the world.  As their privacy laws may not match your home country’s standards, we’ll only make a transfer of data if adequate levels of protection are in place to protect any information held in that country, or the local service provider complies with applicable privacy laws at all times.

Where required by law, we will take measures to ensure that personal data handled in other countries will receive at least the same level of protection as in your home country. 

We may sometimes be required to disclose information about you to law enforcement bodies, agencies or third parties, under a legal requirement or court order. We will act responsibly and take account, where possible, of your interests when responding to these requests.

If you are concerned about these arrangements to disclose or share personal data with third parties, you should contact us and ask us not to process your personal data.

9. Keeping information secure

We invest significant resources to protect your personal data, from loss, misuse, unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. However, no system can be 100% secure, and so we cannot be held responsible for unauthorised or unintended access that is beyond our reasonable control.

10. Information about others

If you provide us with information about other individuals, like details of a referee or personal contact, you must ensure they’ve agreed to this. We would advise you to keep a record of their agreement and provide them with a copy of, or link to, this Privacy Policy.

11. Keeping your records

We keep your personal data for as long as required to provide our services, and in accordance with legal, tax and accounting requirements. Where your personal data is no longer required, we will ensure it is disposed of in a secure manner. Where required by law, we will notify you when this has happened. Typically data is retained for four years following our last meaningful contact with you.

In some circumstances we will anonymise your Personal Data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes, in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.

12. What rights do I have?

The right to be informed

Starfish Search provides fair processing of information by way of this privacy notice.

The right of access

You have the right to obtain confirmation as to whether or not we are processing your data and a right to obtain a copy of the data that we hold. This is known as a Subject Access Request. Please contact us at info@starfishsearch.com to make a request.

The right to rectification 

If any information held is inaccurate or incomplete, you have the right to have that information corrected or deleted, if other parties have been passed the information (such as HMRC) we will, where possible, inform them of the rectification undertaken. Please contact your local Starfish Search contact to make this request.

The right to erasure (also known as the “right to be forgotten”) 

You have the right for your information to be deleted. We will oblige as long as there are no reasons for us to keep the information. For example, where we have to keep certain pieces of information for minimum periods in line with legislation.

The right to restrict or object to processing 

You have the right to block or restrict processing, this won’t affect the processing done so far, but will stop further processing.  For example, if you apply for a role, we will have to keep information on file for a certain period; we can however remove you from our active candidate talent pools if you wish not to be contacted about further opportunities.

The right to data portability 

You have the right for your information to be provided in a machine readable format to enable easy transfer between processors. This right is available to personal data provided by you.

The right not to be subject to automated decision making

Please note that no automated decisions, such as computerised candidate profiling, are made based on the information we collect.

The right to withdraw consent 

Where we process information based on the data subject’s (your) consent, you have the right to withdraw consent at any time. Please note where you withdraw your consent this will not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal nor further processing of the same data under other legal basis such as contract or compliance with a Starfish Search legal obligation

The right to complain

If you wish to discuss your personal data or lodge a concern about the way in which it is handled, please use any of the following details:

Email: info@starfishsearch.com 

If you are unhappy with our response, you have the right to complain to the Supervisory Authority, the details of which are below:

Supervisory Authority: Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)

Website: https://ico.org.uk/concerns/

Email: casework@ico.org.uk Telephone: 0303 123 1113

13. About our website

This Privacy Policy applies to our website too, where we process personal data within and through this website.

The primary purpose of our website is to provide you with information regarding the services provided by Starfish Search Limited and consultants. 

We use the personal data we collect from you on our website for additional purposes such as personalising the look and feel of the website to fit the personal preferences inferred from how you’ve used the site. (See the “Analytics” and “Cookies” sections for more information.)

We may disclose or share personal data with third parties as outlined above to operate the website and provide our executive search services, as well as assessment services in certain countries. If you are concerned about these arrangements, you should not use the website and contact us to ask us not to process your personal data.

Finally, we might also use your data, to help our clients understand who is making use of our website and how their job vacancies are being viewed.

14. Analytics

We may use third-party Service Providers to monitor and analyse the use of our Service.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google uses the data collected to track and monitor the use of our Service. This data is shared with other Google services. Google may use the collected data to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network. You can opt-out of having made your activity on the Service available to Google Analytics by installing the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. The add-on prevents the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js, analytics.js, and dc.js) from sharing information with Google Analytics about visits activity.

For more information on the privacy practices of Google, please visit the Google Privacy & Terms web page: https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en

15. Links To Other Sites

Our Service may contain links to other sites that are not operated by us. If you click on a third party link, you will be directed to that third party’s site. We strongly advise you to review the Privacy Policy of every site you visit.

We have no control over and assume no responsibility for the content, privacy policies or practices of any third party sites or services.

16. Cookies

Tracking & Cookies Data

We use cookies and similar tracking technologies to track the activity on our Service and hold certain information.

Cookies are files with small amount of data which may include an anonymous unique identifier. Cookies are sent to your browser from a website and stored on your device. Tracking technologies also used are beacons, tags, and scripts to collect and track information and to improve and analyse our Service.

You can instruct your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, if you do not accept cookies, you may not be able to use some portions of our Service.

Examples of Cookies we use:

Session Cookies. We use Session Cookies to operate our Service.

Preference Cookies. We use Preference Cookies to remember your preferences and various settings.

Security Cookies. We use Security Cookies for security purposes.

17. Third party websites

This Policy only applies to this website. If you land on our site from other websites or move to other ones from our website, you should read their separate privacy policies.

18. Contacting us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or would like to exercise your rights with respect to your personal data, please contact us at info@starfishsearch.com, clearly noting in the subject line Privacy Policy.

London Fraud Hub – December 2023

Over the next few months a number of London Borough Council’s that we provide temporary workers to, will be taking part in a national exercise to compare data held on employees, agency staff and Council Suppliers with information held by other authorities and organisations.  This is initiative is called the London Fraud Hub and is an exercise run by the Cabinet Office with its aim to tackle fraud and protect the public purse.

As part of this initiative, data will be shared into the Hub in order to prevent and detect fraud.  The Cabinet Office will be responsible for carrying out data matching exercises which allows potentially fraudulent claims and payments to be identified.  Where a match is found, it indicates that there is an inconsistency and further investigation is required.  No assumption can be made as to whether there is fraud, error or other explanation until an investigation is carried out.

The use of data by the cabinet Office in a data matching exercise is carried out with statutory authority under Part 6 of the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014.  It does not require the consent of the individuals concerned under the Data Protection Act 2018.

Data Matching by the Cabinet Office is subject to a code of practice.​

Further information on the National Fraud Initiative is available on the government’s website.

As the data controller for our candidate’s details this addition to our privacy policy is to inform any current or future candidates on temporary assignments through Starfish Search Limited that their personal data will be shared with the Cabinet Office for the purpose of this initiative.