Privacy Statement

Data Protection Guidelines and Terms of Use

Last changed on: 24 June 2019

1. Responsible for the processing of personal data:

Optares GmbH & Co KG, Heiligengeist Höfe 8, 26121 Oldenburg, Germany
and its subsidiary
OPTARES ICM GmbH & Co KG, Heiligengeist Höfe 8, 26121 Oldenburg, Germany
(hereinafter referred to as “Optares” or “we”) are responsible for the collection, processing and use of your personal data pursuant to Art. 4 no. 7 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”).

If you wish to object to the collection, processing or use of your data by us in accordance with these data protection provisions in whole or in part, please direct your objection to our data protection officer.

2. Introduction and definition of terms

2.1. Introduction

Thank you for your interest in Optares GmbH & Co KG and our online presence at www.optares.de (our website). The protection of your personal data is very important to us, and is why we would like to inform you here about data protection in our company. We do, of course, observe the statutory provisions of the German Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other data protection regulations (including the Telemedia Act and the Commercial Code) that may apply to our business activities as personnel consultants.

Optares GmbH & Co KG (hereinafter referred to as “Optares” or “the entity responsible for processing”) is a medium-sized, owner-managed, independent company founded and administered in Oldenburg, Lower Saxony. Our corporate purpose is the direct placement and transfer of qualified and highly qualified employees. We use the data provided to us for processing exclusively for these purposes. The disclosure of personal data without the express consent of the applicant or employee (“data subject” or “candidate”) ) or for any purpose other than that described, is contrary to our corporate ethics and is prohibited.

The use of our website is, in principle, possible without disclosing personal data. However, if a data subject wishes to make use of the services of our company, it may be necessary to process their personal data. This privacy policy is intended to inform the public about the nature, extent and purpose of the personal data we collect, use and process. In addition, it will inform data subjects of their rights under this policy.

2.2. Collection of general information

When you access our website, information of a general nature is collected automatically. This information (server log files) includes, for example, the type of web browser, the operating system used, the domain name of your internet service provider and the like. This is exclusively information that does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about your person. It is technically necessary for the correct delivery of content requested by you from websites and is mandatory when using the internet. Anonymous information of this kind is evaluated statistically by us in order to optimise our internet presence and the technology behind it.

2.3. What are personal data?

The term “personal data” is defined in the GDPR. It states that personal data are individual details about personal or factual circumstances of an identified or identifiable natural person. They include, for example, your real name, your address, your telephone number or your date of birth.

3. Provision of personal data

3.1. Basic principles

The provision of personal data for processing by the responsible entity is voluntary and is in principle neither legally nor contractually prescribed. You are not obliged to provide personal data. However, the provision of personal data is required for the conclusion of a contract, e. g., about an employment relationship with us or our clients. Please be aware that the provision of certain personal data is required by law (e. g., tax legislation) or in accordance with contractual regulations (e. g., information about the contracting party). You may contact one of our employees before providing personal details. Our employee will explain to you individually whether the provision of personal data is a statutory or contractual requirement, is necessary for the conclusion of a contract, whether there is an obligation to provide personal data, and what the consequences of not providing the personal data may be.

3.2. Online application system

As a user of our website, you have the option of sending personal data to us using input forms (“online application system”). The personal data entered via the online application system are collected, processed and used by us exclusively for the purposes of application processing and the recruitment process. We store and process your data confidentially at all times in accordance with the applicable data protection regulations.

3.3. Sending of application documents by email

You also have the option of sending your data to our staff by email. In this case, you will receive a confirmation of receipt of your data and these will be transferred to our application system, where they will be processed confidentially and in accordance with the legal requirements of the GDPR and BDSG.

3.4. Collection of personal data as part of an active search

Optares also conducts an “active search” for potential candidates on career networks such as LinkedIn, Xing, Experteer and other similar networks or public internet sites. The search is carried out only and exclusively in the “publicly accessible area” authorised by users of these career networks.

If candidates whose public profile could meet the requirements of our clients are identified here, Optares may contact them. The identity and interest of Optares are clearly formulated at the time of this initial contact and the candidate has the option of choosing whether or not to provide Optares GmbH & Co. KG with further personal data in addition to data publicly available.

Optares will only process this data if the candidate expressly consents to said processing of personal data as described in this privacy policy.

If a candidate has no interest in the specific position to be filled, but is in principle interested in collaboration with Optares, they will also be asked for consent to the processing of their personal data. If a candidate is not interested at all in the services of Optares, no further processing of personal data will take place.

Only in those cases in which it is not possible to establish initial contact with the candidate at short notice, will the publicly accessible data be processed provisionally without our having obtained consent. Optares assumes in these cases that the processing of the data before clarification is obtained is in the interests of the data subject pursuant to Art. 6 para. 1, lit. f GDPR. Because at the time of data collection, Optares is not able to inform the data subject in accordance with the provisions of Art. 14 GDPR, this procedure is waived temporarily on the basis of Art. 14 para. 5 lit. b GDPR.

4. For what purpose are your personal data processed?

Some personal data are collected during registration for the use of our personalised services. By registering, you agree that the person responsible for processing your data may use your contact data for the purpose of establishing and maintaining contact and that all communications concerning this usage relationship may be sent by email, unless another form is prescribed by law.

By submitting your application via our website, you declare your express consent to Optares storing, transmitting and using your data within the framework of the procedures described in this data protection policy and in compliance with the provisions of the BDSG and the GDPR. You declare you agree to the submission of the application documents to the above-mentioned companies within the Optares Group (based on Art. 6 para. 1 lit. f GDPR and recital 48) as well as to customers and clients of Optares.

After the successful completion of an application process, a candidate may be offered temporary employment. In accordance with our legal obligations and in order to facilitate the temporary hiring, we transmit the personal data required for this to the hirer. The legal basis for this is § 26 para. 1 clause 1 and para. 8 no. 1 BDSG and § 1 para. 1 Temporary Employment Act (AÜG).

We include data subjects with whom no employment contract has been concluded after completion of an application process related to a specific job advertisement as well as unsolicited applications in an applicant pool in order to be able to consider them for future jobs. Your personal data and documents will be stored in the applicant pool for a maximum period of seven years and checked for matches with new job offers. Of course, your rights to inspect, delete and update the data remain unaffected by this. We will regularly contact you in this regard during the storage period in order to ensure that the data are up-to-date at all times and to secure your consent for further processing of your data. You can revoke your consent to the use of personal data at any time and have it deleted.

To enable Optares GmbH & Co KG to present you with suitable professional positions in a targeted manner and in accordance with your wishes and ideas, your personal data will be collected, processed and stored for this purpose. These data will include at least: family name, first name, date of birth, full address, contact details, current job, desired location, availability and your other career aspirations. In addition, for a successful placement, we need all the information normally found in a curriculum vitae. Your data will be processed to the extent necessary for the establishment and structuring of an employment relationship or for the procurement of a professional position. Your data may be processed for the following purposes within the context of a search assignment from our clients:

  • carrying out searches for potential candidates on behalf of clients who have a vacancy in a specialist or management position,
  • to operate the database in which your personal data are stored in order to inform you about potential specialist or management positions that may be of interest to you,
  • evaluation of your suitability for existing or up-coming vacancies with clients,
  • to present you to our clients as a candidate and potential future employee, and
  • to make contact with you, e. g., to make an appointment with you for a personal or telephone interview.

If the data are passed on to our clients for the above purposes, we have no influence on the storage, use or deletion of this data by the third party; any claims under data protection law must therefore be directed in this case to the third party alone. However, in your best interests, Optares will do its utmost to protect the personal data transmitted. By submitting any photographs to Optares, you consent to them being sent to interested third parties together with the application documents. If you wish to restrict the scope of the mediation (“non-disclosure notice”), you must inform us of this.

Your data will be stored for a further six months in accordance with the statutory provisions, even after termination of an application relationship, and transmitted to a supervisory authority, if this is indicated in accordance with statutory requirements. We may also process personal data to the extent necessary to defend ourselves against legal claims asserted against us in the application process. The legal basis is Art. 6 para. 1, lit. f GDPR. The legitimate interest is, for example, an obligation to provide evidence in proceedings under the General Equal Treatment Act (Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz - AGG).

No data will be forwarded to third countries.

There is no exclusively automated processing of personal data, such as “profiling”.

5. How do our partners protect your data?

Third parties commissioned by us may also have access to personal data as contract processors who perform certain tasks for us and in accordance with our instructions. Examples of this are IT service providers who perform tasks in the areas of hosting, database management, website management, maintenance services, web analyses and the handling of incoming enquiries and data analyses. We require the contracted partners who provide these services for us to implement and maintain security measures to ensure the confidentiality and security of the data you entrust to us, and to collect, process and use the personal data only in accordance with our instructions and as contractually agreed.

6. How long are your data stored?

An important criterion for the duration of storage of personal data is the respective legal retention period. After expiry of this period, the data concerned will be routinely deleted unless they are no longer required for the fulfilment or initiation of the contract. We adhere to the principles of data avoidance and data economy. We will therefore only store your personal data for as long as is necessary to achieve the purposes stated here or for the various storage periods prescribed by law. After the termination of the respective purpose or the expiry of these periods, the data concerned will be deleted routinely and in accordance with the statutory provisions.

7. How can you access, correct or delete your personal data?

According to the applicable data protection laws, you have the following rights:

  • The right to information and receipt of a copy of your personal data:
    You are entitled to request confirmation as to whether and how we process your personal data. In some cases, you may ask us to send you an electronic copy of your personal data.
  • The right to correct your personal data:
    if your personal information has not been correctly collected by us, you may request that this information be updated or otherwise corrected.
  • The right to be forgotten/to have the data deleted:
    under certain circumstances you have the right to have your personal data deleted. You can make a corresponding request at any time. We will check whether your request can be met and whether this right conflicts with other legal rights and obligations, and may be required to retain information. In cases where retention periods do not prevent deletion, we will comply with your request without delay.

To exercise your rights, please contact us at the following address: datenschutz@optares.de

In some cases we will obtain your consent to process your personal data. You can revoke this consent at any time. Upon revocation, we are prevented from further processing your data. You can file a complaint with your local data protection authority.

8. On what legal basis do we process your data?

Our company adopts Art. 6 para. I lit. a GDPR as the legal basis for processing operations for which we obtain consent for a specific purpose. A given consent can be revoked at any time. Your consent indicates your willingness for us to store and process your personal data until you revoke it and, after consultation with you, to forward such data to employers of interest to you and who are looking for staff.

If the processing of personal data is necessary to fulfil a legal obligation to which our company is subject, Art. 6 para. 1 c GDPR serves as the legal basis.

If the processing is necessary to safeguard a legitimate interest of our company or a third party and if the interests, fundamental rights and fundamental freedoms of the data subject do not outweigh the first-mentioned interest, Art. 6 para. I lit. f GDPR shall serve as the legal basis for the processing. A legitimate interest may exist in particular:

  • in the performance of our business activities and those of the client. The ability to fulfil our corporate purpose of personnel search and personnel placement requires contact to be established with candidates and potential future employees with the aid of personal data. There is no conflict of interest on the part of the person concerned because we only use publicly available data for this purpose or data provided by candidates themselves for the purpose of establishing professional contacts, with the result that the data are earmarked for a specific purpose.
  • in the storage of contact information of the candidates in order to comply with our obligation to provide information, disclosure and deletion of the relevant personal data;
  • in the pursuit of our corporate interests, to improve our performance in order to attract candidates for suitable specialist, management or executive positions at an early stage;
  • in the forwarding, exchange and processing between Optares GmbH & Co KG mentioned in No. 1 and its subsidiaries as members of a group of companies.

9. What measures do we take to secure stored data?

If we collect personal data, we or our contract data processors store it on specially protected servers in Germany. Access to it is only possible for a few specially authorised persons who are involved in technical, commercial or editorial support. In order to avoid loss or misuse of data, we take extensive technical and organisational measures (TOMs), which are regularly reviewed and adapted to technical progress. However, we would like to point out that, due to the structure of the internet, it is possible that the rules of data protection and the above security measures may not observed by other persons or institutions for which we are not responsible. In particular, unencrypted data can be read by third parties - even if sent by email. Data made available via our portal are protected against misuse by an encrypted connection with the server. In order to protect the security of your data during transmission, we use state-of-the-art encryption procedures (e. g., SSL) via HTTPS.

Optares GmbH & Co KG has therefore implemented numerous technical and organisational measures to ensure the greatest possible protection of personal data processed via this website. Nevertheless, internet-based data transmissions can in principle have security gaps, so we cannot guarantee absolute protection.

10. Cookies

Like many other websites, we also use so-called “cookies”. Cookies are small text files that are transferred from a website server to your hard drive. These automatically provide us with certain data, such as IP address, browser used, operating system, via your computer and your connection to the internet.

Cookies cannot be used to start programs or transfer viruses to a computer. The information contained in cookies enables us to make navigation easier for you and to display our web pages correctly.

Under no circumstances will the data collected by us be passed on to third parties or linked to personal data without your consent.

Of course, you can also view our website without cookies. Internet browsers are regularly set to accept cookies. You can deactivate the use of cookies at any time using your browser settings. Please use the help functions of your internet browser to find out how to change these settings. Please note that some features of our website may not work if you disable the use of cookies.

11. Privacy policy on the use and application of contact forms

If you contact us by email or contact form, the information you provide will be stored for the purpose of processing your inquiry and for possible follow-up questions.

12. Privacy policy on the use and application of Google Analytics

We use Google Analytics, a web analysis service provided by Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043 USA, hereinafter referred to as “Google”, on our site. Google Analytics uses cookies, text files placed on your computer to help the website analyse how you use the site.

The information generated by these cookies, such as the time, place and frequency of your website visit, including your IP address, is transmitted to and stored by Google in the United States.

On our website, we use Google Analytics with an anonymisation function and the addition of “_gat._anonymizeIp”. In this case, your IP address is shortened by Google within Member States of the European Union or in other signatories to the Agreement on the European Economic Area and thus anonymised.

Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of our website, compiling reports on website activity for us and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage. Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google's behalf.

Google will, according to its own information, not in any case associate your IP address with any other data held by Google. You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings in your browser, however please note that if you do this you may not be able to use the full functionality of our website.

Google also offers a opt-out add-on for the most popular browsers, which gives you more control over what information Google collects about the websites you visit. The add-on informs the JavaScript (ga.js) of Google Analytics that no information about the website visit should be transmitted to Google Analytics. However, the opt-out add-on for browsers of Google Analytics does not prevent information from being transmitted to us or to other web analysis services we may use. For more information on installing the browser add-on, click on the link below:
tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

You can disable the use of cookies by Google by visiting the Google Advertising Disable page. Alternatively, you can disable the use of cookies by third parties by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative disable page. However, we would like to point out that in this case you may not be able to use all the functions of this website to their full extent.

13. Privacy policy for the use and application of script libraries (Google Fonts)

In order to display our content in a correct and graphically appealing manner across browsers, we use script libraries and font libraries on this website, such as Google Fonts (https://fonts.google.com/). Google Fonts are transferred to your browser's cache to avoid multiple loading. If the browser does not support Google Fonts or does not allow access, content will be displayed in a default font.

Calling up script or font libraries automatically triggers a connection to the library operator. It is theoretically possible – but currently also unclear whether and, if so, for what purposes – for the operators of such libraries to collect data.

The privacy policy of the Google library operator can be found here:
https://www.google.com/policies/privacy

14. Privacy policy regarding the use and application of Google Maps

This website uses Google Maps API to visually display geographic information. When Google Maps is used, Google also collects, processes and uses data on the use of the map functions by visitors. For more information about data processing by Google, please see the Google Privacy Policy. There you can also change your personal data protection settings in the data protection centre.

Detailed instructions on how to manage your own data related to Google products can be found here.

15. Privacy policy for the use and application of Google AdWords

Our website uses Google Conversion Tracking. If you have reached our website via an advertisement placed by Google, Google Adwords places a cookie on your computer. The conversion tracking cookie is set when a user clicks on an ad placed by Google. These cookies lose their validity after 30 days and are not used for personal identification. If the user visits certain pages on our website and the cookie has not expired, we and Google may detect that the user clicked on the ad and was directed to that page. Each Google AdWords customer receives a different cookie. Cookies can therefore not be tracked via the websites of AdWords customers. The information collected using the conversion cookie is used to generate conversion statistics for AdWords customers who have opted for conversion tracking. Customers see the total number of users who clicked on their ad and were redirected to a page with a conversion tracking tag. However, they do not receive any information that identifies users personally.

If you do not wish to participate in tracking, you can reject the setting of a cookie required for this – for example via browser settings that generally deactivate the automatic setting of cookies or set your browser so that cookies are blocked by the domain “googleleadservices.com”.

Please note that you may not delete opt-out cookies for if you do not wish to provide statistical data. If you have deleted all the cookies in your browser, you must set the opt-out cookie again.

16. Privacy policy on the use and application of Indeed Conversion Tracking

We use Indeed Conversion Tracking on our website. Indeed Conversion Tracking is a service provided by Indeed Ireland Operations Limited, 124 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland. The Conversion Tracking cookie is set when a user clicks on a job advertisement placed by Optares GmbH & Co. KG on Indeed. Cookies are small text files that are stored on your computer system. These cookies lose their validity after 30 days and are not used for personal identification. The cookie accompanies you during the application process. Upon completion of the application, it transmits this information to the Conversion Tracker, which counts receipt of the application, i. e., a conversion. Each Indeed user receives a different cookie. Cookies cannot be tracked through the websites of Indeed advertisers. The information collected using the conversion cookie is used to generate conversion statistics. These tell us the total number of users who have clicked on their ad and completed an application. However, the information collected does not contain any personal data that can be used to identify users personally. If you do not wish to participate in tracking, you can opt-out of such use by deactivating the Indeed Conversion Tracking cookie under User Preferences in your internet browser. They will then not be included in the conversion tracking statistics. You can find out more about Indeed's privacy policy at the internet address below:
https://de.indeed.com/legal#privacy

17. Privacy policy on the use and application of buttons with links to social networks

On our website, we use buttons with links to our presence on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram as well as buttons to share our contributions in the social media. These buttons do not transmit any data to the social networks mentioned. Only when you press the buttons will you leave our website and be redirected to our presence on the social networks you clicked on. You will then no longer be on our internet pages, but on the pages of the social networks you clicked on. Depending on the settings in your browser or on the social network, personal data about you will be collected there. You can find the conditions for this in the data protection policies of the social networks clicked on, and for which we cannot assume any responsibility.

We do not use “Like” buttons on Facebook on our internet pages, because they collect data about you, even if you have not clicked on these buttons.

18. Changes to our Privacy Policy and terms of use

We reserve the right to change this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect current legal requirements or to implement changes to our services in the Privacy Policy, such as the introduction of new services. Your next visit will then be subject to the new privacy policy.

19. Questions to the Data Protection Officer

If you have any questions regarding data protection, please send an email to datenschutz@optares.de or contact our Data Protection Officer directly.

Marc Steenken
Dipl.-Kfm. (FH)
Cloppenburger Str. 9
26135 Oldenburg
Email: datenschutz@optares.de