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Stuart Gentle Publisher at Onrec

New survey report finding: Nearly one-fifth of UK recruiters may not be ready for GDPR

ETZ Payments, the recruitment back office technology specialist, has just published a new survey report.

How ready for GDPR are the UK’s recruitment firms?’ aims to help uncover attitudes and practice and show how well prepared the UK’s recruitment companies are for the new information security standard, the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (EU-GDPR).

One of the key findings is that nearly one-fifth (19%) of UK recruitment firms may not be ready for the GDPR. The report is based on responses to two short surveys conducted online in November 2017. Firstly, to get the view from the inside, one survey was aimed at recruitment firms. Secondly, to get the view from some of those closest to the issues, contractors and temporary workers were surveyed.

GDPR is going to come into force on the 25th May 2018 and compliance is not an overnight fix. General awareness in the population is not all that it could be, and ETZ wanted to see how well the recruitment sector has managed to get up to speed and take control of the issue.

Recruitment firms hold some pretty personal information about contractors, temps and candidates and there have been some big data leaks. But the issue of information security is not just about hackers breaking in, there’s also ‘insider’ activity. For example, the practice of recruiters taking the database of clients when changing job is widespread.

One of the key things about GDPR compliance failure is that it cannot be blamed on a 3rd party, like an IT support or a cloud software service provider. But this is very poorly understood. It was quite startling to see how much the expectation of recruitment firms deviates from the principle that is embedded in the GDPR regulatory framework.

When taken together with the views revealed by responses to the contractor and temporary worker survey, the report will be immensely helpful to those running recruitment businesses. By helping firms to consider how to align agency efficiency and profitability with GDPR compliance and the expectations of agency workers, it shows that GDPR can be leveraged as an opportunity.

Download the full survey report here: https://www.etzpayments.com/white-papers/ready-gdpr-uks-recruitment-firms/