Privacy Policy

Introduction

This website, jackiebedford.com, is the personal brand website of Jackie Bedford — career and employability specialist and founder of Step Ahead Social Enterprise Community Interest Company ('Step Ahead', 'the Company', 'we', 'us', 'our'). The site operates as a hub for Jackie's career guidance content, free resources, and tools, and connects visitors to Get Hired Expert, a career education brand operated by Step Ahead under licence from Jackie Bedford.

Jackie Bedford, Get Hired Expert and Step Ahead are closely connected. Resources, tools and courses referenced or accessed via this website are delivered under the Get Hired Expert brand, operated by Step Ahead Social Enterprise CIC. For the purposes of data protection, Step Ahead Social Enterprise CIC acts as the data controller for personal data collected through this website.

You may give us your personal details directly, for example when you sign up to our mailing list, submit a contact form, download a free resource, or access one of our free AI tools. We may also collect information about how you use our website through analytics and tracking tools. The Company must have a legal basis for processing your personal data, and we will only use it in accordance with the terms of this notice.

Collection and Use of Personal Data

a. What data we collect

Depending on how you interact with this website, we may collect the following personal data:

• Your name and email address, when you sign up to the Jackie Bedford mailing list or submit a contact form
• Your phone number, if you choose to provide it when signing up (this field is always optional)
• Your audience type, for example whether you are a student, graduate, parent, career changer or employer, if you select this when signing up to the mailing list
• Your message and any details you share when you contact us via the contact form
• Information about how you use this website, collected through analytics tools including Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager and Microsoft Clarity, such as pages visited, time spent on the site and how you arrived
• Cookie data, as described in our Cookie Policy

b. Purpose of processing and legal basis

We collect and process your personal data for the following purposes:

• To send you career advice, free resources, tools and updates from Jackie Bedford and Get Hired Expert, where you have signed up to receive these — legal basis: your consent
• To respond to enquiries submitted via the contact form — legal basis: legitimate interest
• To deliver free resources and AI tools you have requested access to — legal basis: legitimate interest and/or performance of a contract
• To understand how visitors use this website and improve the experience — legal basis: legitimate interest
• To comply with legal and financial obligations — legal basis: legal obligation

c. Legitimate interests

Where we rely on legitimate interest as our legal basis, our legitimate interests are:

• Providing you with access to free resources, tools and career guidance content
• Contacting you with information about courses, tools or services similar to those you have accessed or shown an interest in
• Responding to your enquiries and managing our communications
• Maintaining and improving our website and services
• IT security and fraud prevention

d. Marketing communications

When you sign up to our mailing list, you may receive emails from Jackie Bedford and from Get Hired Expert. These brands are closely connected — Jackie Bedford is the personal brand, and Get Hired Expert is the career education brand through which courses, tools and resources are delivered. Communications may come from either or both, but will always be relevant to the reason you signed up.

You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in any email we send you, or by contacting us directly at [email protected].

Recipients of Data

The Company works with the following third parties to deliver our services. Such third parties will have access to your personal information only so far as is necessary to provide their services to us:

• Go High Level (GHL), our customer relationship management platform, used to manage mailing list contacts, deliver email communications and handle form submissions
• Clio, used to manage WhatsApp messages and automated conversations where applicable
• Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager, used to analyse website traffic and visitor behaviour
• Microsoft Clarity, used to understand how visitors interact with the website through session recordings and heatmaps
• OpenAI (ChatGPT), which powers our custom-built AI tools including the CV/Résumé Analyser, Job Decoder and Parent Pocket Coach. See 'Our AI Tools' below for more detail
• Stripe, our payment processor, used to handle any payments securely where applicable
• Our professional advisers, including accountants and legal advisers
• Government, law enforcement agencies and other regulators, where we are required to share information by law
• Any other organisation you ask us to share your data with

Our AI Tools

We do not automatically receive, view or store the content you submit into these tools. However, OpenAI may retain your chats, uploaded files and related content in accordance with its own privacy policy, data controls and your ChatGPT account settings.

If you use a personal ChatGPT account, your conversations may be used by OpenAI to improve its models unless you have opted out in your OpenAI data settings. If you use ChatGPT Business, Enterprise or Edu, OpenAI states that data is not used for model training by default.

Please avoid submitting unnecessary sensitive personal information. You are responsible for deciding what information you choose to enter into the AI tools.

To use these tools, you will need your own free ChatGPT account. Your use of ChatGPT is also subject to OpenAI's own terms and privacy policy, available at openai.com/privacy.

Cookies and Analytics

This website uses cookies and analytics tools to understand how visitors use the site and to improve the experience we provide. This includes Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager and Microsoft Clarity. These tools may collect information such as your IP address, browser type, pages visited and how you arrived at the site.

Microsoft Clarity may record session replays and generate heatmaps to help us understand visitor behaviour. No personally identifiable information is captured in this process beyond what is described in this notice.

You can manage your cookie preferences at any time. Please see our Cookie Policy for full details.

Overseas Transfers

Some of the third parties we use, including Go High Level, Google, Microsoft, Clio and OpenAI, may store or process personal data outside the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area ('EEA'), including in the United States. Where this is the case, we take steps to ensure appropriate safeguards are in place to protect your information, in line with UK data protection law. The EEA comprises the EU member states plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein.

Data Retention

We will retain your personal data only for as long as is necessary for the purposes for which it was collected:

• Mailing list data is retained for as long as you remain subscribed. If you unsubscribe, we will remove you from active communications promptly, though we may retain a record of your unsubscribe request to ensure we do not contact you again in error
• Contact form submissions are retained for as long as necessary to respond to your enquiry and for a reasonable period thereafter in case of follow-up
• Analytics data is retained in accordance with the data retention settings of Google Analytics 4 and Microsoft Clarity
• Payment and financial records are retained for as long as required by HMRC, currently six years from the end of the relevant tax year
• Where we process data on the basis of your consent, we will continue to do so until you withdraw that consent

When personal data is no longer needed, we will delete it or anonymise it, unless we are required to retain it for legal, accounting or legitimate business reasons.

Your Rights

You have the following data protection rights:

• The right to be informed about the personal data we process about you
• The right of access to the personal data we process about you
• The right to rectification of your personal data
• The right to erasure of your personal data in certain circumstances
• The right to restrict processing of your personal data
• The right to data portability in certain circumstances
• The right to object to the processing of your personal data that was based on a legitimate interest
• The right not to be subjected to automated decision making and profiling
• The right to withdraw consent at any time

To exercise any of these rights, or if you have any questions about how we handle your personal data, please contact us at [email protected].

There may be circumstances where we still need to process your data for legal or official reasons. We will inform you if this is the case, and will restrict the data to only what is necessary for those purposes.

Complaints or Queries

If you wish to raise a concern about how we handle your personal data, please contact us in the first instance at [email protected] and we will do our best to resolve it.

You also have the right to raise concerns with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) — on 0303 123 1113 or at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/ — or any other relevant supervisory authority, if you believe your data protection rights have not been adhered to.