Privacy Policy

What information do we collect and where do we collect it from?

Personal Information You Provide: we collect the Personal Information you give us when you create an account, upload a CV or use the Services, including:

• Account Information, such as your name, email address and password. We store only a hashed form of your password, so nobody can read it.
• CV Information, such as the text of the CVs you upload, their file names, and the job titles, skills and seniority our AI finds in them. We keep the text, not the file itself.
• Job Search Information, such as your messages, the jobs and places you search for, the jobs we find for you, how well they match your CV, and the cover letters, application answers, interview practice and interview preparation we write for you.
• Application Information, such as the jobs you tell us you applied for and how they’re going: waiting to hear, interview, offer or not successful.
• Preference Information, such as your email settings and, if you tell us, whether you need visa sponsorship to work in the UK.
• Payment Information, such as your top-ups, what each request cost and any refunds. You enter your card details on our payment provider’s secure page: we never see or store your card number.
• Feedback Information, such as ratings, messages, what you tell us helped, and whether you’re happy for us to quote you.
• Profile Photo, if you add one.

You need to give us your name, email address and a password to create an account. Everything else is up to you: without a CV, for example, you can still search for jobs and check listings, but you won’t see match scores or get cover letters.

Personal Information Automatically Collected: as with most websites, we and our hosting providers collect some information automatically when you use the Services, including:

• Log File Data, such as your IP address, browser type, the date and time of your visit, and the pages you ask for.
• Location Data, such as the country your browser’s language settings suggest when you sign up.

Personal Information from Other Sources: our payment provider tells us the country your card was issued in and whether a payment succeeded. To find and check jobs we also use publicly available information, such as job adverts, information about employers, and public government records like the UK register of licensed visa sponsors. That information is about jobs and employers, not about you.

Please don’t include sensitive information in your CV or messages, such as health conditions, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation, unless you want us to use it. CVs often include other people’s details, such as referees: only include them if they’re happy for you to share them.

What do we use Personal Information for?

We use Personal Information for the purposes below. Data protection law requires a lawful basis for each, which we give in brackets.

• Service Delivery: to provide the Services you ask for, including creating and running your account, reading your CV, searching for jobs and scoring them against your CV, checking listings for signs of fraud and for visa sponsorship, writing cover letters and answers, helping you prepare for interviews and tracking your applications (our contract with you).
• Payments: to charge for what you use, run your wallet and keep financial records (our contract with you, and our legal obligations).
• Service Emails: to send the emails you need, such as confirming your email address, password resets and confirming that you’ve deleted your account (our contract with you). Unless you turn them off, we also email you when a long request finishes while you’re away and check in about jobs you applied for (our legitimate interest in helping you follow your job search through).
• Security and Compliance: to keep the Services secure, prevent misuse, find and fix problems, and comply with the law (our legitimate interest in running a safe, reliable service, and our legal obligations).
• Research and Development: to understand how the Services are used and improve them, using aggregated figures such as how many people heard back after applying, where their jobs came from, and what feedback says (our legitimate interest in making Career Scout better).
• Testimonials: to quote your feedback, for example on our website, only if you’ve told us we may (your consent, which you can withdraw at any time).

We do not sell your Personal Information, use it for advertising or send you marketing emails. We never send your CV to employers or apply for jobs on your behalf: you decide where to apply, and you apply yourself.

How do we use AI?

The Services are built on AI. This section explains, in plain terms, how it’s used.

What AI does. When you ask for something, the Services send the information that request needs, such as your message, the text of your CV and the job advert, to AI models that understand your request, score how well jobs match your CV, check listings for signs of fraud, and write letters and answers.

Who runs it. The AI models are provided by established third-party AI providers. They process the information only to produce the result, are not permitted to use it to train their models, and keep it only for a limited time, if at all, for example to detect misuse.

What AI does not do. We do not use your CV or messages to train AI models. AI doesn’t apply for jobs, contact employers or make decisions about you: match scores and checks are there to help you decide, and employers never see them. We don’t make decisions with legal or similarly significant effects based only on automated processing.

You stay in control. AI can make mistakes. Read every letter and answer before you use it: you’re its author.

Do we use cookies?

Yes, but only the ones the Services need to work. One cookie keeps you signed in, and two small notes in your browser remember the job you went to apply for and that you’ve seen our cookie notice. We don’t use advertising, analytics or tracking cookies. Our Cookie Policy has the details.

Where do we process data?

We are based in the United Kingdom. Some of our service providers process Personal Information outside the UK and the European Economic Area, including in the United States. Where they do, we use the safeguards data protection law requires, such as adequacy regulations (including the UK–US data bridge) or standard contractual clauses. Contact us at privacy@careerscout.uk for further information about these transfers or a copy of the safeguards.

How long do we retain your data?

• Account data, including your CVs, chats, letters, applications, feedback and photo: for as long as you have an account, unless you delete it sooner. You can delete a chat or a CV at any time.
• Financial records, such as top-ups, charges, refunds and card payments: six years, because UK law requires us to keep accounts. When you delete your account, we remove your name and email address from them.
• Sign-ins last up to 30 days. Links we email you, such as a password reset, stop working after a short time.
• Log File Data is kept by our hosting providers for a short time, then deleted automatically.

When you delete your account, we delete your CVs, chats, letters, applications, feedback, photo and sign-ins straight away, and send one email to confirm it.

Do we disclose any information to outside parties?

We share Personal Information only as follows:

• Service Providers. We use service providers that work on our behalf, each of which receives only what it needs and may use it only to provide its service to us:
  • cloud hosting and database providers, which store your account and run the Services
  • AI providers, which receive what each request needs, such as your message, your CV’s text and the job advert
  • a web search provider, which finds job adverts and information about employers from search terms such as job titles, places and employer names
  • job boards and job search services, which receive the job titles and places you search for
  • an email delivery provider, which sends our emails to your email address
  • a payment provider, which takes card payments on its own secure page
  • our professional advisers, such as accountants and lawyers, when we need them
  Web search and job search services never receive your name, email address or CV.
• Employers. We don’t share your Personal Information with employers. When you apply for a job, you do it on the employer’s or job site’s own page, under its privacy policy.
• Business Transferees. If Career Scout is involved in a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, your Personal Information may pass to the new owner, who must protect it as this Privacy Policy does.
• Security and Compelled Disclosure. We may share Personal Information to comply with the law or a lawful request from a public authority, or to protect the rights, property and safety of Career Scout, our users or others.
• Consent. We may share Personal Information for any other purpose with your consent.

We may share aggregated or de-identified information that can’t identify you. We do not sell, trade or otherwise transfer your Personal Information except as this Privacy Policy describes.

Privacy rights and choices

• Account information. You can update or correct your details, delete chats and CVs, or delete your whole account from your profile.
• Emails. You can turn off the emails about finished requests and the check-ins on jobs you applied for in your profile, and every check-in email has a link to stop them. You’ll still receive the emails your account needs, such as password resets.
• Your rights. You can ask us for a copy of your Personal Information and information about how we use it and who receives it; to correct or delete it; to limit how we use it; to give it to you or another company in a machine-readable format; and to stop using it where we rely on your consent. Email privacy@careerscout.uk. We’ll respond within one month, and may need to confirm your identity first.
• Complaints. If you’re not satisfied with how we handle your Personal Information, please tell us first so we can put it right. You can also complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk, 0303 123 1113) or, if you live outside the UK, to the data protection authority where you live.

Your right to object

You can object at any time to our use of your Personal Information for our legitimate interests, such as the check-in emails or the aggregated figures we use to improve Career Scout. Email privacy@careerscout.uk, or turn the emails off in your profile, and we’ll stop unless we have compelling grounds that outweigh your interests, or need the information for a legal claim.

Children’s Personal Information

The Services are for people aged 18 and over, and we don’t knowingly collect Personal Information from anyone younger. If we learn that we have, we’ll delete it. If you think a child has given us their information, email privacy@careerscout.uk.

Third-party services

The Services link to job adverts and other pages on employers’ and job sites’ websites. This Privacy Policy doesn’t apply to them, and we’re not responsible for how they handle your information: please read their own privacy policies.

Data security

We use technical and organisational measures to protect your Personal Information, appropriate to the information we hold: every connection to the Services is encrypted, passwords are stored only as hashes, the sign-in cookie can’t be read by web page code, and only the people who run Career Scout can see account information, and only what their work needs.

No transmission over the internet can be guaranteed to be completely secure. If a breach puts you at risk, we’ll tell you and the regulator as the law requires.

Updates to this Privacy Policy

We’ll update this Privacy Policy from time to time, and change the “Last updated” date at the top when we do. If a change affects how we use your Personal Information, we’ll tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect.

Contact us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or your Personal Information, email privacy@careerscout.uk.