GDPR - Understanding the "Comms status" in your candidate records
In light of the European legislation (GDPR) introduced on 25th May 2018, we’ve introduced a ‘Comms status’ to the candidate profile page to help you decide how and what to communicate with your candidates. These decisions will be based on the data and privacy policy of your business.
Although this legislation is European in origin, you're probably aware that even if you are operating outside of the EU, the legislation will still apply to you with regard to any European Citizen data you hold.
Therefore, the ‘Comms status’ is a useful reference tool, regardless of where you are operating.
There are three simple statuses which exist on a candidate record:
‘Applied’
This status is triggered on any candidate record that is associated with the candidate making an application to you. If the candidate is created via an application, then this will be the status they are immediately given.
If a candidate already existed on your idibu account with a different status, then this will be updated to ‘Applied’ when the application is recieved.
You can then judge how and when, and regarding what you should communicate to your ‘Applied’ candidates based on your company policy.
‘Unknown’
If the candidate has been created inside idibu via any other means than an application, their default ‘Comms status’ will be ‘Unknown’.
This serves as a gentle warning to take care with how you choose to communicate with the candidate based on their history and how they were uploaded into idibu by you or another user in your business. How you choose to proceed is completely dependent on your company policy.
If the candidate applies to one of the adverts you have posted via idibu at a later date, then their status will be updated to ‘Applied’.
‘Unsubscribed’
If a candidate has received an automated email via the idibu candidate engagement suite, whether that is an autoresponder triggered by their application, or any other mail, they will always have the option to unsubscribe from further communication should they choose to.
If this is the case, then their status will be updated to ‘Unsubscribed’ and they will not receive any further emails from either the engagement suite, or via the idibu integrated email tool.
The will also be precluded from SMS messages sent via idibu.
Checking the history of your candidate 'comms status'
Every time the candidate's 'comms status' is updated we record a note in the 'notes and emails' tab of their record. So if a candidate status is 'unknown', then they apply for one of your adverts, a note will record their status changed from 'unknown' to 'applied'. If they 'unsubscribe' from further communication, then this will be recorded too.
To check the history, go to the 'Notes and emails' tab.
If there are a lot of notes then you can click 'Filer notes' and select 'Comms status'
The notes list will then filter to only show the 'comms status' entries.
What if a candidate wants to exercise their 'Right to be forgotten'?