The consent module gives you great control over how you capture the consent of your candidates and contacts, as well as helps to automate the expiration of data and subsequent removal. Before you go ahead and activate the the tool though, there are a number of things you'll need to consider and prepare ahead of turning on the module.

This guide will help to ensure you have considered all angles in regards to data retention, before you begin to automatically contact your candidates and contacts or start deleting data.

First and foremost, the consent module needs to be configured in line with your privacy and data retention policies. As Eploy are unable to advise on how you should manage your data, the best place to start is by understanding your company policy, paying close attention to how long you intend to store data, how the data is used and why information is captured. You can add a link to the privacy policy within the consent module when you configure it, so having this to hand will help ensure that candidates have all information they require.

There will be certain records that you will need to keep, based on your retention policies, beyond the normal consent term. In fact, you may need to stop these candidates from being able to withdraw their data at all, based on legitimate business interests. This is achieved using Exclusions within the consent module, which are a set of filters designed to identify the specific circumstances which would excluded the Candidate or Contact from needing to provide consent, and prevent them from being able to withdraw their data.

Once activated, the tool will automatically email any candidates who haven't previously consented and haven't been excluded from providing consent. Email reminders will also be issued if they don't respond to the first email, so ensuring that the email content is in line with your brand and sends the right message will be imperative before you turn the function on.

The Consent email and SMS templates can be accessed by navigating to Admin > Consent > Candidate/Contact > Emails. As with all email templates in Eploy, these can be fully customised and can be used to provide information and link to relevant pages, such as your data and privacy policies, or even directly to the Update Preferences page within the Candidate Portal itself.

Don't forget, Eploy can send an SMS alongside every email it sends. If you want to maximise the potential for data retention, you might want to include an SMS templates as well!

When a Candidate or Contact's consent does expire, what should be done with the data? Within the consent module, you have the choice between deleting the record in full or anonymising the Personal Identifiable Information (PII) contained within the record. From the candidate's perspective, there is no difference - all traces of them will be removed from the system. However, if you delete the record, any associated records (interview or application data etc) will also be removed.

When you configure the consent module, you will have the opportunity to add a description and some hyperlinks to the registration page of the candidate portal. As this will be part of your first interaction with the candidate, you will want to ensure that the message is clear to the candidate how and why you capture the data, as well as link to the relevant policies, so it is best to plan what this should say before looking to set the tool up.

This text will be visible to Candidates within their profile, as well as within the consent function itself so you need to ensure that it is relevant, concise and gives the candidate access to all the information they need.

As well as configuring consent to store their data, you may also want to give Candidates a series of preferences, which will allow them to opt in or out of receiving emails, SMS or any other marketing activity. This will give the candidates more control over what you do with their data and means you can put restrictions in place to avoid accidentally emailing those that opt out.

If you do decide to include these preferences, it's recommended to make it clear that these related to recruitment and business Marketing communications, not Job Alerts or regular Application related email communications.

The consent module is split into two subsets - Candidates and Contacts. This is to allow you to have a different configuration, retention period and exclusions between these record types and ultimately manage your data differently based on the type of people.

Both option can be found within Admin > Consent and the configuration options are largely the same. However, as contacts don't have a portal interface in the way that candidates do, the email communication and preferences become even more important in ensuring you are not storing data you don't need.

As both modules work independently, there is no obligation to use both. If all of your contacts are your employees, you may not need to use the contact consent module at all.