This is an important update for Talent Acquisition professionals working in organisations that hire across multiple markets, as it allows seamless international compliance.

Alva allows you to set different data retention periods for the different countries where you are operating.

Here’s more information on how Alva protects and processes User Data.

To see how you can tailor your data privacy specifications to individual markets, go to ‘Settings’ in your Alva Control Panel and navigate down to ‘Data Privacy’ on the left-hand column. Click on ‘Data Retention’.

On the Data Retention page, you can tailor your settings however you’d like, either by defining a new standard for all countries or customising that information on an individual market level.

Alva’s baseline policy for data retention is for 24 months. This starts on the date you add a candidate. After this period has expired, personally identifiable candidate data in the platform will be anonymised. This includes:

But if you’re hiring in multiple markets, you might want to set these parameters differently. If you want the same data retention period for all markets, you can adjust those settings near the top of the page, in the field across from ‘Retention Period for Candidate Data.’ This logic will then be applied to all new jobs you create, and you’ll see this confirmed in the ‘Position Settings’ when you create a job.

Let’s say you have a set protocol for data retention but need to make adjustments for additional markets where you’re active. Navigate down the page to add specific rules for countries. In the example GIF below, we’ve added custom settings for Norway, Finland, Austria, and Sweden.

To add a new market, simply click on ‘+ Add country’ and select from the field (you can also type this information in to save time). Finally, apply your new settings by clicking on ‘Save.’

Important note about Alva’s data retention logic for countries with short data retention periods. Our countdown starts from the day you add the candidate, rather than the end of the hiring process.

So if you have a data retention period in a particular market that’s set at one month, and it normally takes two months to complete a hire, we recommend to our customers that they add a small buffer to the average time it normally takes to complete a hire, so that some of the candidate data doesn’t get anonymised during the middle of a hiring process.

In the case above, we’d recommend customers set the data retention period as three months to give themselves enough of a window.

As an admin, you can also define the location for each of your Alva users. This can be done via the Control Panel, navigating over to ‘Employees’ in the left-hand column (you can also do this by clicking on the ‘Employees’ card).

To make adjustments, select the name of the recruiter and then add the country where they’ll be active. Going forward, the new job this user creates will find your custom data retention settings already applied.

Whenever you add new users, be sure to include the country where most of their jobs will be based.

Your specific data retention settings can be automatically applied when you create a job through one of our ATS integrations. Right now, these are supported in the following ATS:

We also plan to integrate our new data retention settings into two additional ATS providers:

If the ATS has a ‘Location Sync’, then our logic will automatically use the location sent by the ATS. If not, we default to the location tagged to the user in Alva. In case that information has not been added, we’ll apply the default data retention period.