Excessive personal info requested on applications
 

I have noticed that agencies such as career.aero aka Interpersonal and more than a few airlines are in the habit of requesting, on first contact, such sensitive data as passport scans, date of birth, full residential address, even mugshots!

This is extremely foreign to every other industry that I have worked in. It seems excessively intrusive, a major risk from an identity theft point of view and completely out of line with EU data protection rules.

I would understand generic questions such as whether or not the candidate has a passport valid for at least another X months, whether they have the right to work in EU/wherever, whether they are within a certain height range as appropriate to certain cockpits, etc. After telephone screening and if invited for a personal interview, then the candidate can bring the requested documents and those can be checked. Eventually when making an offer copies would be obtained as necessary.

Why is it not done like this?

I'm not even getting into the ads that blatantly ask for minimum / maximum ages, etc.

They are not the only one.
I was offered a job by an operator in their office when I visited them which I kindly rejected. They took the GDPR matter very seriously and the Director of Flight Ops handed me all the copies of my certificates and documents and made personally sure all were erased from their database. And I was invited to apply to them again in future.

The most "instrusive" so far have been British operators with questions about my ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation and a few weird questions I had never been asked before.

That is very good to hear and definitely the way it has to be done. Would you be able to share the name of this organisation, so I and others know who "the good guys" are, should we come across them?

Yeah I'm in two minds about those. The intention is good but it's just a daft way of dealing with things and it just perpetuates the idea that people are different in completely arbitrary ways (look at the weird and totally unscientific "ethnicities" that they come up with). I either never fill that in (should be voluntary) or put random nonsense. Those forms are also a major GDPR minefield.

Anyway, I would just like to know if anyone knows whether there is a clearly valid reason for demanding things like copies of personal IDs, intimate details such as where one has completed their primary / secondary education, and headshots.

I'll leave this thread open for a week or so and if no compelling reasons have been put forward I'll start reporting the cases I have come across to the relevant data protection agencies (career.aero is just one instance amongst others, though perhaps the most blatant. Being Germans they should know a lot better).

Banana Joe, are you British, or of another nationality?

I ask this as if you're not a Brit I can totally understand why these questions are awkward and intrusive. However, under UK law, and to the best of my knowledge, these questions are asked and then kept totally separate to all other data the company holds about you. Doing this means that should any discrimination then be raised by you for any racism, sexual, religion etc the company can check your original submission. These same very questions also prevent the organisation from the possibility of hiring people in a discriminatory manor. It is quite intrusive, i'll give it that. But it's been about in the UK for years.

I am not British.

As far as i know you need to give written consent to interpersonal to keep your data, if you revoke your consent they remove your data from their records. I did exactly that...

Perhaps explains why you find it a little odd. In any case it's required under our laws so that's why you'll be asked it.

If you don't pass a selection process, just ask your data be removed under the EU's GDPR law.

Are you sure it's required? I was always under the impression that you were at liberty to disclose that info or not.

Even if it was in the books that does not necessarily make it legal post-GDPR. I would have to check the Regulation again (I am quite familiar with it but not the part dealing with especially sensitive data since we just don't handle any), but I really don't think those forms are still kosher. Besides, they never helped anyway save perhaps as an arse covering exercise.