The purpose of this data protection declaration is to provide you with transparent information about the processing of personal data in connection with the application, selection and recruitment process.
1. Introduction
Swiss Life Ltd (hereinafter “Swiss Life” or “we”) takes the protection of your privacy and personal data extremely seriously. The relevant principles of data protection legislation and other regulatory requirements accordingly apply in everyday practice at Swiss Life.
This includes ensuring that Swiss Life adequately and consistently protects your personal data and safeguards the confidentiality, integrity, availability, traceability and proportionality requirements when processing your data.
The following is an overview of the processing activities involving your personal data in connection with the application, selection and recruitment process.
This description is not exhaustive. Further information on data protection in relation to individual products, business activities and the processing of your data in connection with the provision of advice and support can be found at https://www.swisslife.ch/privacy.
2. Controller and data protection officer
For the purposes of data protection law, Swiss Life Ltd, General-Guisan-Quai 40, P.O. Box, 8022 Zurich is responsible for processing personal data in connection with the application, selection and recruitment process.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding data protection law, please contact the Swiss Life data protection officer at the following address:
Swiss Life Ltd
Data Protection Officer
General-Guisan-Quai 40
P.O. Box, 8022 Zurich
E-mail: datenschutz@swisslife.ch
3. Categories of personal data processed
In connection with the application process, we process the following categories of personal data in particular for the purposes set out in section 4:
- Data that you enter or upload in an application via our career page:
- Master data (e.g. salutation, first and last name, street, building number, place of residence, country of domicile, gender, date of birth, age, marital status, languages, nationalities, e-mail address, telephone number, residence permit and other data relating directly to you);
- Data on your education and qualifications (e.g. educational qualifications, language skills, diplomas);
- Data on current and former employers (e.g. name of employer, length of employment, reference details);
- Other data in your application documents (e.g. your cover letter, photos, references, CV, references to third-party sources such as social media profiles);
- Data that you provide to us when registering for the “Job Subscription,” such as your e-mail, in order to provide you with information on vacancies in accordance with your selection;
- Data that you provide to us during the application process (e.g. answers to qualification questions, salary expectations). When appropriate, we will invite you to complete an online assessment at a later stage. As part of this assessment, you will be asked to answer questions about your professional behaviour and complete numerical and/or verbal tasks. This information will be used to compile a personality profile for you, an abbreviated version of which you will be able to access;
- Data you provide to us to prepare for contractual employment (e.g. AHV/AVS number, account number, number of children).
We usually receive this data from you or a recruitment agency commissioned by you as part of the recruitment process.
4. Processing purpose
Swiss Life processes your personal data (section 3) in connection with the application process in particular for the following purposes:
- As part of the implementation of the application, selection and recruitment procedure (e.g. to conduct an interview, to assess the suitability for the position in question, to optimally fill vacancies, to obtain references). For this purpose, we process in particular master data, communication data and data that you provided to us during the application process;
- Statistical surveys (e.g. surveys of applicant behaviour). Statistics are only created for internal purposes, and the results of the analysis of such statistics are never personalised, but rather anonymised. If we want to process your personal data for a purpose that is not listed above, we will inform you of this in advance;
- Fulfilment of statutory and other legal requirements (e.g. combating money laundering and terrorism financing, clarification of legal and reputation risks, reporting, fulfilment of duties of disclosure, information provision and reporting, archiving, handling complaints and other notifications, monitoring of communication, internal or external investigations, disclosure of documents to the authorities, support in the prevention, detection and investigation of criminal offences and other breaches). For these purposes, we process in particular master data, communication data, and in some cases also behavioural data and data you provided to us during the application process;
- Other purposes: ( e.g. security purposes, monitoring buildings and publicly accessible premises, internal administration, training and education, bookkeeping, data archiving, managing IT, safeguarding our rights, evaluating and improving internal processes, statistics and research, safeguarding other legitimate interests).
“Processing” means any handling of personal data, e.g. its collection, storage, use, disclosure, deletion and automated evaluation in order to determine preference data, assess risks or conduct statistical evaluations. This also includes profiling, i.e. automated processing for analysis and forecasting purposes (e.g. for marketing purposes, to prevent abuse and to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism).
5. Data recipients
We may disclose data pursuant to section 3 in particular to the following categories of recipient to the extent required for the purposes pursuant to section 4:
- Swiss Life Group companies (for details see www.swisslife.com);
- Authorities and offices: in connection with the exercise of rights, the defence of claims and the fulfilment of legal requirements, we may disclose personal data to authorities, offices, courts and other public bodies, e.g. in the context of official, judicial, pre-litigation and extra-judicial proceedings and in the context of legal obligations to provide information and cooperate. The authorities are solely responsible for processing data about you that they receive from us.
- Internal and external service providers (e.g. IT service providers, address and shipping service providers, marketing, distribution, communication or printing service providers etc.).
- Other third parties such as advertising partners, social media providers, video platform providers and service providers involved in the staging or organisation of events.
These recipients may be based abroad (e.g. for the transmission of personal data when using IT services etc.). Your data may therefore be processed anywhere in the world by countries that do not all have a level of data protection equivalent to Swiss law. We therefore take contractual precautions and generally make use of standard contractual clauses (further information can be found at www.edoeb.admin.ch), unless an exception applies (e.g. in legal proceedings abroad, in cases of overriding public interest, if the processing of a contract requires such disclosure or if you have given your consent).
6. Obligation to provide personal data
As part of the application process, you will be asked to provide the personal data necessary to carry out the application and recruitment process. Without such data we will not be able to carry out the application process and decide whether there are grounds for establishing an employment relationship.
7. Duration of processing
We process your data for as long as our processing purposes, the statutory retention periods and our legitimate interests in processing for documentation and evidence purposes require or storage is technically necessary. We process your personal data for the duration of the application process. If you are hired, we will continue to process your personal data in this connection. Otherwise, we will delete (electronic files) or destroy (physical documents) your data no later than six months after the end of your application process. The storage duration is based on legal and internal regulations and the processing purposes (cl 4). If these purposes have been achieved or no longer apply and there is no longer any obligation to retain it, we will delete or anonymise your data as part of our usual procedures.
If, without being asked to do so, you send application documents by post or share your interest in a position by telephone, we will not process and store your personal data further but will instead make you aware of the option of applying online. We will destroy any documents submitted in this manner and not store them.
8. Data security
We treat personal data confidentially and take appropriate security measures of a technical and organisational nature to safeguard the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your data, to protect it against unauthorised or unlawful processing and to prevent the risk of loss, unintentional alteration, unwanted disclosure or unauthorised access.We are guided by recognised security standards such as ISO 27001. However, security risks cannot be completely ruled out and certain residual risks are unavoidable.
We use appropriate encryption mechanisms to protect your data when it is transmitted via our online service. However, we can only secure areas that we control. If you contact us by e-mail, you do so at your own risk and consent to us replying to you via the same channel to the sender’s address. If you send us unencrypted e-mails over the internet, they may be accessible, viewable and manipulable by third parties, and data may be lost or intercepted and/or manipulated by third parties. We also take suitable technical and organisational security measures to reduce the risk within our web pages. However, your end device is outside the security area under our control. You should therefore inform yourself about the necessary security precautions and take appropriate measures in this regard.
9. Your rights
You have certain rights as defined by the relevant legal conditions and framework which may, however, be subject to certain prerequisites and restrictions:
- To request information from us as to whether and which data we process about you;
- To have data corrected by us if it is inaccurate;
- To object to our processing and to request the deletion of data if we are not obliged or entitled to process it further;
- To ask us to hand over certain personal data in a conventional electronic format or transfer the data to another controller;
- To revoke your consent if our processing is based on your consent.
If you would like to have all of your application data deleted, you can request this via the “Account Settings” on our career site. Deletion is not possible if we are obliged or entitled to store the personal data on the basis of applicable legal provisions.
If we notify you of an automated decision in a specific instance, you have the right to state your position and to request that the decision be reviewed by a natural person.
If you wish to exert your rights in respect of us, please contact us, for example by e-mail to datenschutz@swisslife.ch (other contact information listed in section 2). In order to rule out misuse, we will need to identify you.
If you do not agree with our handling of your rights or data protection, please let us know as specified under section 2. You can contact the Swiss supervisory authority at https://www.edoeb.admin.ch/edoeb/en/home.html .
10. Updating our data privacy policy
Swiss Life reserves the right to modify this data protection declaration without prior notice to take account of current statutory provisions and changed business procedures. As a general rule, the data protection declaration in its current version at the start of processing applies for data processing. This data protection declaration does not form part of the contract.
Last update: September 2023