How long does your recruitment business need to devote to preparing for the incoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?
The clock is ticking ahead of the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will come into force on Friday 25th May 2018.
GDPR is being brought in to improve data security and give consumers more rights over the personal information that businesses hold on them. Companies will have to comply if a consumer wants to know more about how their data is being held or wants it deleting, or risk being faced with significant penalties.
Your recruitment business will need to know where its data is stored, exactly who has access to it and how it is protected, so a sizeable amount of work will be needed to prepare for GDPR's arrival. But how much time is this likely to take?
How long are companies spending preparing for GDPR?
The Data Compliance Doctors recently carried out a survey to find out how much time GDPR prep is taking up for the UK's small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), finding that, on average, companies have spent the equivalent of 80 business days getting ready for the incoming legislation.
Most SMEs said they would be starting the new year by contacting their customers to seek permission to hold on to their data, spending the first few weeks of January on this task before focusing their attentions on other aspects of GDPR.
Overall, more than two-thirds (69 per cent) of respondents reported they would be contacting people directly in order to do this, with 70 per cent doing so via email and 38 per cent by letter.
However, 43 per cent of those questioned revealed they would be contacting their customers via phone, which will naturally take up a lot more time, but could add a more personal touch to the approach.
Your recruitment business needs to think about how it wants to tackle this task, and whether it wants to simply prioritise obtaining data permission, or if it wants to spend the time reassuring candidates and taking a more personal approach along the way. You'll then be able to better estimate how much of your time GDPR prep is likely to take up.
Start preparing as soon as possible
As long as your recruitment business is compliant ahead of the legislation's introduction on 25th May, it's technically not too late to begin preparing, but it will of course save a lot of stress and worry if you start as soon as possible.
If you haven't begun your GDPR preparations yet, you're not alone, but the clock is ticking, so you need to begin thinking a lot more seriously about how your recruitment business is going to tackle the matter.
That's why we'll be publishing a series of blogs to guide you through some of the bigger challenges you'll face when implementing GDPR at your recruitment business.