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OPINION
The majority
of us aren’t
aware of the
information
our previous
employers
have about us
and probably
don’t give
it a second
thought
Job hopping is the new normal.
Talk to anyone in their early 30s
and the chances are they will have
changed jobs at least four times
1
since leaving full-time education.
This trend has implications for
employees and for their employers.
For job-hopping employees, it
presents obvious challenges in
terms of how they manage their
finances, their pension plans
and their working relationships
with colleagues. For employers,
alongside the loss of knowledge and
the drain on resources to recruit
and train new employees, it creates
a significant yet often ignored
information management challenge.
An inconvenient truth about
changing jobs that few of us
consider is the trail of personal
information we leave behind the
moment we walk out the office door
on our way to new pastures. We
leave behind records containing
highly sensitive information such as
CVs and copies of our passports, ID
cards and driving licenses; we leave
salary information, performance
reviews, a disciplinary record and
even, in some instances, details of
our medical history.
The law dictates that such
information should be retained and
securely deleted after a defined
period of time. But with the average
millennial worker set to have up to
16 jobs
1
during their career, keeping
track of which employer holds what
information about us and until
when is an impossible task.
The right to be forgotten
The majority of us aren’t aware
of the information our previous
employers have about us and
probably don’t give it a second
thought. However, we do expect
our personal data to be protected
and managed according to legal
requirements. After all, we have a
right to be forgotten and should be
able to trust our former employers
to respect that right. Herein lies
the information challenge facing HR
departments and information and
records managers everywhere.
An employee leaving represents
a trigger event that starts a clock
ticking. This requires the employer
to ensure that the employment
records associated with the
individual employee are destroyed
at a predetermined date some five,
six or more years into the future.
Event-based retention and
destruction of records is hard to
get right. Think of the numbers
of clocks that are ticking in any
HR department, all set to go off
at different times. Think of the
complexity involved in making sure
that all copies of digital and paper
records are accounted for. Overlay
this complexity with increasing
Sue Trombley, managing director of thought leadership at Iron Mountain,
outlines the data privacy challenges presented by job-hopping
What you leave behind
staff turnover and evolving data
privacy rules and it’s easy to see
why businesses and their HR
departments find it so difficult.
Out of date processes
Recent research from Iron Mountain
shows us that 50% of mid-market
businesses (250-2,500 employees)
in Europe and the US are poorly
placed to meet the requirements
of event-based retention. They are
managing their HR records with
out-of-date processes that could be
putting personal information at risk.
The same research shows that 31%
of mid-market businesses store HR
documents relating to employees
longer than they are legally entitled
to and 25% are unaware of the
legal requirements.
There’s no doubt that getting
event-based retention right is a
headache for businesses. The
2013-2014 Information Governance
Benchmarking Survey by Cohasset
Associates, ARMA International
and AIIM reveals that 67% of
organisations believe their records
and information management
programme would benefit from
fewer event-based retention
periods. Perhaps that’s no surprise
Sue Trombley,
managing director
of thought leadership,
Iron Mountain
