Updated October 2026

In short

We are a recruitment agency working in the IT channel. We also produce Channel Chat, our industry podcast and media platform, and run events, webinars and research for the channel community.

To do both, we hold information about candidates looking for work, contacts at the companies we work with, our suppliers, and people who engage with our content and events.

We keep what we need, for as long as we need it, and delete it when we don't. We do not sell or rent your data to list brokers or data resellers. Where we share business contact details with sponsors of our events, or introduce people across the channel, we explain how that works later in this policy. You can ask us at any time what we hold, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Every marketing message we send has a one-click unsubscribe.

This policy is written under the UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. Robertson Sumner Ltd is the data controller. We are registered in England and Wales under company number 03886767, and our registered office is The Quadrant Centre, Limes Road, Weybridge, KT13 8DH.

Our brands

In this policy, “Robertson Sumner”, “we” and “us” mean Robertson Sumner Ltd and the brands, publications, podcasts, events and media properties we operate, including Channel Chat. One policy covers all of them, and your choices apply across all of them.

Who this applies to

•    Candidates — anyone who applies for a role through us, sends us a CV, or whose professional profile we find through job boards or networking sites

•    Client and business contacts — people at companies we recruit for, work with, or who engage with our content, events and sponsorship opportunities

•    Suppliers

•    Referees, and emergency contacts for our staff and contractors

•    Website visitors, podcast listeners and event attendees

•    Podcast guests, event speakers, and people photographed or filmed at our events

What we collect

Candidates

•    Name, contact details and location

•    Employment history, education and qualifications

•    Current and expected salary, benefits and notice period

•    Right to work status and, where a role requires it, identity documents

•    NI number

•    Bank details

•    Timesheets

•    Tax status

•    Your CV and notes from conversations with our consultants

•    Referee details, where you provide them

•    Anything else you, a referee or a client chooses to tell us

•    Information about a disability or health condition, where you tell us so that we can make adjustments for an interview or assessment

Where a client requires it we may collect diversity information — ethnicity, gender, disability, age, sexual orientation or religion — used only on an anonymised basis for equal opportunities monitoring. If a client asks for this information, we give it to them only in anonymised, aggregated form and never alongside your name or CV. This is special category data and we will always ask for your explicit consent first. You can refuse, and it will not affect how we work with you.

We do not collect criminal records information. If a specific role ever requires it, we will tell you separately at the time, explain the legal basis we rely on, and only collect it with the appropriate safeguards in place.

You do not have to give us your information, but if you do not provide certain details, such as right to work documents or the information a client needs to consider you, we may not be able to put you forward for a role.

Client and business contacts

Name, job title, organisation, work contact details, and a record of our dealings with you — conversations, meetings, roles registered, placements made, events attended, and how you engage with our content and communications. For suppliers we also hold bank details so we can pay you.

Referees and emergency contacts

Name and contact details only, given to us by the candidate or staff member who named you.

Website visitors and content audiences

IP address, browser type, how you use our site, and whether you open or click our emails. Collected through cookies and email tracking — see the cookies section.

Podcast guests and event speakers

Name, job title, organisation, biography, photograph, and the recording of your appearance, which we publish as part of Channel Chat. We agree the terms of publication with guests before recording. We may take photographs and video at our events. We say so at the event, and you can ask not to be included.

Where we get it

•    Directly from you — our website, email, post, events, or conversation with a consultant

•    From job boards and professional networking sites such as LinkedIn, where you have made your profile available to recruiters

•    From our clients, where they tell us about a candidate

•    From referees you have nominated

•    From delegate lists at industry events we run, or at events we attend where the organiser has told delegates their details will be shared with us, and from business sources that are publicly available and intended for professional contact, such as a company website or a professional networking profile

•    Automatically, through cookies and email tracking

If we obtain your details from somewhere other than you — a job board, a networking site, a client, a delegate list or a public business source — we will tell you within one month of getting them, or when we first contact you, whichever is sooner. We will say where we got them and what we intend to do with them, and you can ask us to delete them straight away.

What we use it for, and why we are allowed to

What we do	Why we're allowed to
Match candidates to roles and put them forward to clients	Legitimate interests — this is the service you came to us for
Keep candidate, client and contact records up to date	Legitimate interests
Market our recruitment and talent services	Legitimate interests, with consent where the law requires it
Share Channel Chat episodes, salary surveys, industry reports, research and thought leadership	Legitimate interests, with consent where the law requires it
Invite you to podcasts, webinars, networking events and conferences	Legitimate interests, with consent where the law requires it
Offer sponsorship, advertising, exhibition, speaking and partnership opportunities connected with Robertson Sumner or Channel Chat	Legitimate interests, where relevant to your professional role
Run our salary survey and publish the results in aggregate	Consent: taking part is voluntary
Take up references and verify right to work	Legitimate interests, and legal obligation where applicable
Equal opportunities monitoring	Explicit consent
Payroll, invoicing and tax records	Legal obligation
Make adjustments for an interview or assessment where you tell us about a disability or health condition	Explicit consent, which you can withdraw at any time
Run events and webinars you register for, and record and publish Channel Chat episodes with guests	Contract (to provide what you signed up for) and legitimate interests
Non-essential website cookies, and open and click tracking in our emails	Consent
Establish or defend legal claims	Legitimate interests

Our legitimate interests, stated plainly

We consider it within our legitimate interests to promote our recruitment services, industry content, podcasts, salary surveys, research, events and sponsorship opportunities to existing and prospective clients, candidates and business contacts, where we reasonably believe those communications are relevant to their professional role, organisation or sector.

We only send communications we believe are genuinely relevant to your work. You can object at any time, and every message carries an unsubscribe link.

How we handle marketing

Different rules apply depending on whether we are contacting you at a business or in a personal capacity. We apply them as follows.

Who you are	What we may send you	Your control
A named contact at a company or LLP	Recruitment marketing, Channel Chat content, event invitations, and sponsorship or partnership opportunities relevant to your role	Unsubscribe at any time, in any message
A candidate, or anyone we hold a personal email address for	Roles that may suit you, our salary survey, and recruitment content, where you have opted in, or where you registered with us or applied for a role	Unsubscribe at any time. We will not add you to sponsorship or advertising campaigns
A sole trader or unincorporated partnership	Treated in the same way as an individual. We will not pass your details to sponsors or partners unless you have agreed to it	Unsubscribe at any time

Where we have had dealings with you and then heard nothing for over two years, we stop marketing to you. This does not stop us contacting a business for the first time, which we may do where we believe our services or content are relevant to your role. We do not use bought-in lists. Before making a marketing call, we screen the number against the Telephone Preference Service and the Corporate Telephone Preference Service, unless you have told us you are happy to hear from us.

Taking part in our salary survey

Each year we run a salary survey covering pay, benefits and hiring trends across the IT channel. Taking part is voluntary.

If you complete the survey we collect your answers, which typically include job title, seniority, salary, bonus, benefits, location and the type of organisation you work for. We use this only to produce the published survey and our own market research.

We publish results in aggregate only. We do not publish your name, your employer, or any answer that could reasonably identify you. Where a group of respondents is too small for the results to be reported safely, we combine it with a wider group or leave it out.

If you give us your contact details so we can send you the finished survey, we will use them for that, and to send you related content and roles where you have agreed to receive them. You can unsubscribe at any time. We store your contact details separately from your survey answers.

We keep survey responses in a form that can identify you for no longer than 24 months after publication. After that we keep only anonymised responses, which no longer identify you, so that we can compare data year on year. You can ask us to remove your response at any time before it is anonymised.

Automated decision-making

We use software, including AI tools, to help organise our data and to suggest which candidates may suit which roles. A consultant always reviews these suggestions. Our AI providers act only on our instructions and are not permitted to use your data to train their own models. We do not make decisions about you by automated means alone.

If that ever changes, we will tell you and ask for your consent first.

Who we share it with

•    Clients — for candidates, this is the point: we share your CV and details with employers to get you the role

•    Referees and background-check providers, where relevant to a role

•    Our IT, CRM, marketing automation and software providers, who process data on our behalf under contract

•    Event and webinar platforms, where you register for something we run

•    Sponsors of an event you register for, and partners where we are making a business introduction — see below

•    Our accountants, auditors and legal advisers

•    HMRC and other authorities where the law requires it

•    A prospective buyer, if the business is sold

We do not sell or rent your data to list brokers or data resellers. Every supplier handling personal data on our behalf is bound by a written data processing agreement, and you can ask us for a current list of the providers we use at any time. Where we share business contact details with sponsors or partners, we do so only as set out below.

Sponsors, partners and introductions

Our events, webinars and podcasts are supported by sponsors, and part of what we do is connect people across the channel. That means we sometimes pass business contact details to a sponsor or partner. There are two situations where this happens, and they work differently.

Attendee lists

Our events, webinars and podcasts are made possible by their sponsors, and sponsors receive a list of the people who attended. This is standard practice for business events of this kind and it is part of how the events are funded.

If you register for one of our events, your name, job title, organisation and work email address will be shared with the sponsors of that event. We say so on the registration form and we name the sponsors, so you know before you sign up. If a sponsor joins after you have registered, we will tell you before we share your details. We rely on our legitimate interests in running and funding events for the channel community, and we consider this to be within what attendees at a sponsored business event would reasonably expect.

We share business contact details only. We do not share personal email addresses or personal phone numbers, and where the only details we hold for you are personal ones, we will not pass them to a sponsor. We also do not pass the details of sole traders or members of unincorporated partnerships to sponsors unless they have agreed to it. If you are also registered with us as a candidate, nothing from your candidate record is shared — a sponsor receives only the details you gave when registering for the event, in the same way as any other attendee.

Individual introductions

Where we think two organisations would benefit from talking to each other, we may introduce them. That might be introducing a sponsor to a company we work with, or introducing someone who approaches us to a relevant partner. In practice this usually means passing on a name, job title, organisation and work email address, or making an introduction by email with both parties copied in.

We do this on the basis of our legitimate interests in developing business relationships across the IT channel, and only where we reasonably believe the introduction is relevant and useful to both sides. Where we would be passing your details to someone, rather than copying you into an introduction email, we will check with you first. We make introductions in a professional capacity, using business contact details — never personal email addresses or phone numbers.

If you would rather we did not make introductions using your details, contact us and we will stop.

What we never share

Whichever route applies, we do not share personal email addresses, personal phone numbers, salary information, or anything from a candidate record. Candidate information is only ever shared with prospective employers for a role, as set out earlier in this policy. It is never shared with sponsors or partners.

What happens next

Once a sponsor or partner has your details they are responsible for them in their own right, not as our supplier. They must have their own privacy notice, and any marketing they send you is theirs rather than ours. If you want them to stop, you will need to tell them — though we will help if you ask us.

Where your data is held

Our data is held primarily in the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area.

Some of the providers we use process data outside the UK and EEA. Where that happens we put appropriate safeguards in place, relying on UK adequacy regulations (including, for certified US companies, the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework), or using the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, together with an assessment of the risks of that transfer. You can ask us for details of any transfer that affects you.

How long we keep it

We keep candidate, client and business contact records for up to six years from our last meaningful contact with you, unless you ask us to delete it sooner or the law requires us to keep it for longer.

This period reflects how our industry works. Careers in the IT channel are long, and people we spoke to about one role often come back to the market several years later, sometimes on the other side of the table as a hiring manager. Keeping records for that period means we can pick up a conversation where it left off rather than starting from nothing.

Meaningful contact means a real exchange: a conversation, an email you replied to, an application, an event you attended, or an update to your CV. Opening one of our emails does not count.

Some data is kept to a different timetable:

•    Payroll, invoicing and tax records — kept for the period required by HMRC

•    Identity and right to work documents — for people we place, kept for as long as the law requires; for people we do not place, deleted within [six months] of the check

•    Referee details — deleted once the reference has been taken up, unless the reference forms part of a placement record

•    Records we must keep under the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 — kept for at least one year, as those regulations require

•    Website analytics data — kept for no longer than [26 months]

•    Salary survey responses — as set out in the salary survey section above

•    Records needed to establish or defend a legal claim — kept until that claim is resolved or time-barred

•    Diversity information — anonymised as soon as the monitoring it was collected for is complete

•    Marketing preferences and unsubscribe records — kept indefinitely, so that we do not contact you again after you have asked us not to

Holding a record does not mean we will keep marketing to you. Where we have had dealings with you and then heard nothing for two years, we stop marketing to you, whatever else we hold.

You can ask us to delete your data at any point, and we will, unless we have a legal reason to keep it. We review our records at least once a year and remove anything that is no longer of any use to us or to you, whether or not it has reached the end of its retention period.

Keeping it safe

We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect personal data, including access controls, encryption in transit and at rest, and contractual obligations on our suppliers. We have procedures for dealing with suspected data breaches.

If you think your data has been lost, misused or accessed without authorisation, tell us immediately using the contact details below.

If a breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will report it to the Information Commissioner's Office within 72 hours of becoming aware of it. Where the risk to you is high, we will tell you directly and without undue delay.

Your rights

You can ask us to:

•    Tell you what we hold about you, and give you a copy

•    Correct anything wrong or incomplete

•    Delete your data

•    Stop or restrict what we do with it

•    Send your data to you or another provider in a portable format

•    Stop using it for marketing — always, no questions asked

•    Object to us relying on legitimate interests

•    Withdraw your consent at any time, where we rely on consent. This does not affect anything we did before you withdrew it

•    Ask for a person to review any decision about you that was made by automated means

Your right to object

Where we rely on legitimate interests, you can object at any time and we will stop unless we have compelling grounds to continue. If you object to direct marketing, we will always stop.

We respond within one month, free of charge. If your request is complex we may need longer, in which case we will tell you within that first month and explain why. If we cannot do what you ask, we will always tell you the reason.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, on 0303 123 1113, or at Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF. We would rather you came to us first so we can put it right. You can complain to us by emailing privacy@robertson-sumner.com or writing to the address below. We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days and tell you the outcome without undue delay.

Cookies and email tracking

Cookies are small files stored by your browser. We use them to keep the site working, understand how it is used, and show you relevant roles and content.

Type	What it does	Can you turn it off?
Strictly necessary	Makes the site work	No
Performance	Counts visits and shows which pages are used	Yes
Functional	Remembers your preferences	Yes
Marketing	Shows you roles, content and events likely to interest you	Yes

 

Our marketing emails contain tracking pixels and link tracking, which tell us whether a message was opened and which links were clicked. This helps us send less, and send better. We only use them where you have accepted marketing cookies or otherwise agreed to receive marketing from us, and you can stop them by unsubscribing or by blocking images in your email client.

You can change your cookie choices at any time through the cookie settings link on our website.

Changes to this policy

We update this policy from time to time. The version and date at the top tell you when it last changed. Material changes will be notified to you directly where we can.

Contact us

Robertson Sumner Ltd

30 Dukes Place, London, EC3A 7LP

enquiries@robertson-sumner.com

01753 278000

Privacy enquiries: privacy@robertson-sumner.com

Our supervisory authority is the Information Commissioner's Office.