Relying on legitimate interest for GDPR/data compliance

You always have a legitimate interest to store and contact candidates in your active pipeline. However, you must choose a lawful basis for archived candidates. How lawful basis is selected will depend on how you have configured compliance settings in your Lever environment - GDPR or localized data compliance. To learn about these settings, refer to the following help articles:

• Configuring General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) settings
• Configuring localized data compliance settings

Relying on legitimate interest means that you will not be collecting consent to store candidate data. Instead, Lever will suggest that an opportunity be anonymized when your chosen expiration period has lapsed. Lever will surface opportunities that should be anonymized in a number of ways, including email notifications, inbox notifications, the 'Data Requests' report, and with a banner on the opportunity. To learn more, refer to our help article on anonymizing candidate opportunities.

Candidates may have multiple opportunities. As such, it is possible that your settings dictate that you have a legitimate interest to retain the data from one opportunity and not the others.

This can be the case if the opportunities were archived at different times. Only the opportunity that has passed the expiration period will be included when filtering for opportunities due for anonymization, and only the expired opportunity will have the anonymization banner displayed. After anonymizing from the ellipses menu, data for this opportunity will be removed from Lever, and will no longer be visible on the candidates other opportunities.

When relying on legitimate interest, if a candidate is not based in a protected location, and has applied to roles in both GDPR protected and non-protected locations, you will be prompted to anonymize both the opportunities for jobs in GDPR protected locations and those in non GDPR protected locations. When a candidate has at least one opportunity for a job in a protected location, all of their linked opportunities will say that they are protected by GDPR. 

To learn more about how candidate consent appears on candidate profiles, refer to our help article on viewing consent information on a candidate's profile.

Unsubscribe links

Even though you may have chosen to rely on legitimate interest, you still have the opportunity to ask candidates whether they would like to be contacted regarding future opportunities with your company. Lever allows you to generate unsubscribe links, which are URLs that direct a candidate to a unique page where they are given the option to opt-out from future recruiting communications.

If a candidate chooses not to be contacted, this status will be reflected on their opportunities in Lever. Unsubscribe links can be sent to the same candidate multiple times - all links will continue to work if multiples are sent. Additionally, unsubscribe links are only generated once the email is sent through Lever. For this reason, you should never copy/paste a link from one candidate to send to another.

Sending unsubscribe links

Unsubscribe links can be inserted into emails that you send to candidates using the 'Unsubscribe link' placeholder. To draft an individual email to a candidate, open their opportunity profile and click the mail button. To insert an unsubscribe link into the body of the email, open the 'Placeholder' menu in the email editor and select Unsubscribe link. The link will become live once you send the email to the candidate.

To send out unsubscribe links in bulk, start by selecting multiple opportunities in the pipeline and click the Email button in the bulk action toolbar.

Next, write out the message you want the candidates to receive, using Lever’s placeholders to for fields such as first name and last name. Open the placeholder menu and select the Unsubscribe link placeholder. Insert this placeholder into the body of the email to have Lever generate a unique link for each recipient. When sending unsubscribe links, we suggest providing context to the recipient as to what the link is and what it is for so that they know exactly what action is required.

Click Preview to see what the message will look like to the candidate. You will notice that each recipient is receiving a unique link. If the preview looks as expected, click Send to push the emails out to your candidates.

To make sending consent links even easier, consider creating an email template to collect candidate consent. The unsubscribe link placeholder can be inserted into email templates the same way it can be inserted into individual or bulk-sent emails (described above). Keep in mind that the unsubscribe link will appears as a placeholder in the body of the email template, and change to a unique live link once the template in which it is embedded is loaded in the email composer, and the email is then sent to the candidate. To learn more, refer to our help article on creating email templates.