Bench International is a global, certified woman-owned, retained recruiting and consulting firm providing executive talent and services to the life sciences industries. Bench International’s footprint extends across the US, Europe, and South Australia, as our portal to the Pacific Rim. For over forty years, Bench International has cultivated leaders in service to life sciences industries earning a peerless reputation, one client at a time. Today, Bench International is the oldest and most versatile global retained search firm focused exclusively on life science, healthcare, and consumer health sectors. We are relentlessly client-focused and pioneered milestone and accountability-based fee structures to align our business with quantitative performance metrics based on the long-term value and success of our candidates.
This Privacy Notice reflects Bench International’s commitment to safeguard your privacy and describes how Bench International collects, uses, transfers, and discloses your information in connection with our Recruitment and Consulting Services (collectively, the “Services”). This Privacy Notice also covers other means by which we collect information. For example, it also covers how we collect information from in person discussions, telephone conversations, and through non-electronic communications (i.e., collection through means other than our website).
- Bench International collects information that identifies you as an individual or relates to an identifiable individual (“Personal Information”) to provide Services to you, our clients, and to operate our business. The Personal Information collected by Bench International is used for our business purposes and in accordance with the European General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”; Regulation (EU) 2016/679), Swiss Data Privacy Laws (the Federal Act on Data Protection of 25 September 2020 and its ordinances (“DPA”)), and the data protection laws of the jurisdictions in which we operate. Bench International collects and processes your Personal Information for legitimate business purposes required to perform our Services or based on your consent, where required.
- Bench International complies with its obligations under the GDPR and the DPA by: (1) keeping Personal Information up to date; (2) storing it securely; (3) not collecting or retaining excessive amounts of information; (4) protecting Personal Information from loss, misuse, unauthorized access and disclosure; and (5) ensuring that appropriate technical measures are in place to protect Personal Information.
- In all cases, Bench International processes Personal Information only where: (1) it has a legal right to do so (e.g., collection of data you make available through social media such as LinkedIn); (2) based on your consent, e.g. if you furnish your Personal Information to Bench International in furtherance of future career opportunities; (3) based on a contractual relationship, e.g. if processing is necessary in the performance of the conduct of Bench International’s Services and in providing Services to you now or in the future; (4) based on the law (e.g. with respect to the required keeping of records; and/or, (5) in the individual case, in case of an overriding legitimate interest of Bench International or a third party.
Controller
The data controller in the sense of the GDPR / the DPA, i.e. the entity that determines the purposes and means of the processing of Personal Information, is Bench International Search Inc., 888 Prospect Street, #200, La Jolla, California 92037, United States and/or one of its affiliates worldwide. A list of Bench International’s affiliates can be found here.
Unless otherwise communicated, the Bench International affiliate with which you engage, with which you share your Personal Information or with which you interact in any other way is responsible for processing your Personal Information.
- Bench International stores your Personal Information on our IT platform located in the United States. We transfer Personal Information, or permit access to Personal Information, from any of Bench International’s offices utilizing authorized Bench International equipment throughout the world, including in the United States, Europe, and Australia.
- Bench International has engaged various data processors for the processing of your Personal Information on our behalf, including IT service providers and other business service providers. In some cases, we may need to disclose or transfer your Personal Information within or to third parties in areas outside of your home country in order to perform our Services. We take appropriate steps to ensure that Personal Information is processed, secured, and transferred according to applicable law.
- Some of the non-EEA countries are recognized by the European Commission (“EC”) and the Swiss Federal Council (“FC”) respectively as providing an adequate level of data protection according to EEA / Swiss standards (the full list of these countries recognized by the EC is available here and by the FC here).
- For transfers from the EEA / Switzerland to countries not considered adequate by the EC or the FC, we have put in place adequate measures to protect your Personal Information, namely the conclusion of the EU standard contractual clauses as also recognized under Swiss law.
- Bench International has reasonable organizational, technical, and administrative measures in place to protect against the loss, misuse, and alteration of Personal Information about users of our Services which are under our control. Bench International will, in all circumstances, safeguard personal information as set out in this Privacy Notice.
- The new Data Privacy Framework allows for the secure exchange of Personal Information between EU member states and/or Switzerland on the one hand and certified U.S. companies on the other hand. The certification for U.S. companies and a new U.S. data protection review court in particular will allow Personal Information to be transferred from EU countries / Switzerland to certified companies in the U.S. without any additional guarantees. Bench International is in the process of registering for the U.S. Data Privacy Framework and receiving certification.
- Until certified, Bench International will continue to guarantee adequate data protection by concluding and following the EU standard contractual clauses that are also accepted under Swiss law, both with respect to transfers / disclosures among Bench International’s affiliates and to third party processors.
The type of Personal Information we collect about you depends on the situation at hand.
- We may collect your name, contact details (e.g. e-mail address, postal address, phone number), and your preferred means of communication.
- In the course of our Services, we may collect the following types of information about you as a potential candidate: name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, resume information (employment history, education, professional credentials, memberships in professional organizations, skills, etc.), citizenship, information from former employers, and other references and additional information to the extent we have acquired or you have provided us with such information.
- Where permitted by law, we may collect compensation and benefits information in furtherance of discussions with you and/or our clients as regards career opportunities being pursued on your behalf.
- In the course of our Services, we may request that you participate in an assessment process and collect your responses to a questionnaire you complete which is utilized for this purpose in connection with a position for which you are being considered.
- In certain cases, we request or may externally secure (e.g., through social media, such as LinkedIn), sensitive Personal Information about you. We may use this information to ensure our Services conform with legal requirements such as equal opportunity laws. Sensitive Personal Information may include questions and/or information available regarding gender, race, age, or country of origin. Except in limited cases, we encourage you not to provide any other sensitive Personal Information to us, such as government identification numbers, payment card numbers, information related to racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or other beliefs, health, biometrics or genetic characteristics, criminal background, or trade union membership.
- Please do not provide us with any personal information if you do not agree with this Privacy Notice.
- We collect Personal Information when you submit your resume through via direct e-mail through our website in pursuit of career opportunities.
- We collect Personal Information when you contact us directly by e-mail or telephone and provide Personal Information in pursuit of career opportunities.
- Personal Information about you may come directly from our clients to whom we provide Services.
- When providing our Services, we may also obtain Personal Information about you from referrals, networking activities, public databases, licensed databases, and social media platforms. The information we collect from these third parties may include information about the identity of potential candidates (e.g., an individual’s name, address, telephone number, e-mail address), information about their background and qualifications (employment history, education, professional credentials, memberships in professional organizations, skills, etc.), citizenship, information from former employers, and other references. We may also come into possession of photos of you that you provide to us or that you make publicly available on the Internet (e.g., LinkedIn, management biographies, speaker profiles).
As permitted by applicable laws and subject to your prior authorization, we utilize third party services to obtain background check information (limited to U.S. candidates) and credentials verification information when you are under consideration for a position with our client(s). Any Personal Information that you provide for this purpose will be subject to the third party’s privacy policy, rather than this Privacy Notice. Bench International does not control, and is not responsible for, the third party’s use of information collected through this process. Please note that this Privacy Notice does not address the collection and use of information through the third party’s page or the privacy or information practices of the third party.
If you submit Personal Information to Bench International about persons other than yourself (e.g., a referral), you represent that you have the authority to do so and to permit us to use the information in accordance with this Privacy Notice.
Bench International uses Personal Information we collect in order to assist you with career opportunities, manage our client / candidate relationships or to comply with a legal obligation and in pursuit of a legitimate business interest. Personal Information is used in the following ways:
- We use Personal Information to conduct our business and to render Services to you and our clients.
- If you consent, we may also retain your Personal Information in our talent pool in order to process this and contact you with respect to future job opportunities.
- In the course of our Services, we may use Personal Information that we have collected to create a profile about you. This profile may be used to identify professional opportunities we believe may be of interest to you, and we may contact you from time to time regarding such opportunities. You can always object to our creating a profile about you. If you object, we will remove your profile from our database, but this will also mean that you will not be considered for opportunities in the future.
- We may contact individuals from time to time for referrals.
- We may solicit names of, or additional Personal Information regarding, potential candidates in connection with our Services to understand the market and provide advisory data services to our clients.
- In the course of our Services, we also use your Personal Information to confirm references and conduct education and background checks as appropriate and as permissible under applicable law.
- We may further use your Personal Information that we collect to aggregate and disclose diversity and other statistical information regarding our candidates and placement activities. We do so to meet legal EEOC or similar requirements under applicable law and/or to manage our contractual relationship with you, with your consent, or because we have a legitimate business interest.
- We use your Personal Information to respond to your inquiries, to verify your information, to share information with you and/or to fulfill your requests. If you contact us, we keep a record of your contact information and correspondence, and we use information you provide in your message to respond to your inquiry. We do so to manage our relationship with you.
- From time to time we may use your Personal Information to send you information regarding Bench International, changes to our policies, and other administrative information.
- We may also contact you to verify that the Personal Information we collected about you is accurate and current in order to manage our relationship with you.
- We use your Personal Information for business purposes, such as audits, internal communication regarding candidates and clients, and administering our Services as well as for the secure and stable operation of our website. We may retain and use Personal Information about you for research, benchmarking and norms or trend analysis to improve and enhance our services, in regard to which we aggregate or de-identify Personal Information so that the end-product does not identify you or any other individual. For example, we may use this information to generate norms, by industry, geography, level, etc., to enable us to understand where our Services are being utilized, conduct ongoing validation studies and compile reports. Such aggregated, anonymized, or de-identified information is not considered Personal Information for purposes of this Privacy Notice and we may use it for any purpose. We perform analytics because we have a legitimate business interest in doing so.
- In addition, Bench International may share your information with service providers and website service providers that are neither owned nor operated by Bench International. We expect that all such third-party entities comply with applicable data protection policies and laws; however, you should carefully review the privacy policies and practices of other websites, as Bench International cannot control and is not responsible for privacy policies or practices of such third-party.
Bench International strives to maintain Personal Information that is accurate, complete and current. Your provision of Personal Information to us is voluntary, although if you do not provide certain Personal Information you may not be able to participate in our Services.
Under the GDPR and the DPA, individuals in the EU and/or Switzerland have certain specific rights in relation to their Personal Information. These rights are described below. If you wish to exercise one these rights, please contact our Data Protection Administrator at privacy@benchinternational.com. To ensure an efficient follow-up, we kindly ask you to specify your request and to indicate to which Personal Information your request relates.
- Ask questions about how we handle your Personal Information;
- Withdraw your consent to our use of your Personal Information;
- Object to our use of your Personal Information for our legitimate business interests,
- Request to access, review, correct, update, suppress or restrict the use of your Personal Information;
- Exercise your right to data portability with respect to Personal Information that you dis-closed or is processed in a conventional electronic format.
Although we strive to maintain accurate Personal Information, if it is determined the Personal Information is not accurate, we will work quickly to correct it.
For your protection, we may only implement requests with respect to the Personal Information associated with the e-mail address that you use to send us your request, and we may need to verify your identity before implementing your request (e.g. by requesting a copy of your ID card and/or passport). We will comply with your request as soon as reasonably practical and may need to contact you to be sure that we understand your request.
We do our best to comply with your requests and/or to resolve any issue. If we cannot help, you also have the right to file a complaint with the competent EU supervisory authority or the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (depending on the jurisdiction).
- Bench International will make reasonable attempts to delete Personal Information upon your request.
- Please note that when we perform Services at the specific request of our client, your request may also need to be directed to that client. We may only be able to provide you with a non-confidential summary of our final assessment report because these reports contain confidential client personal information that we are not allowed to disclose.
- We also may need to retain certain Personal Information about you such as your e-mail address to honor opt-out or similar requests. Please keep in mind that this residual Personal Information will remain within Bench International databases, access logs, and other records, which may or may not contain identifiable Personal Information about you. The residual Personal Information will not be used for commercial purposes. However, Bench International reserves the right, from time to time, to recontact former users of its Services, as appropriate and as permissible under applicable law.
Retention Periods
Bench International collects, uses, discloses and otherwise processes your Personal Information as necessary for the purposes identified in the Privacy Notice or as permitted by the GDPR and/or Swiss laws. If we require Personal Information for a purpose that differs from the purposes identified in this Privacy Notice, we will notify you of the new purpose and, where required, ask for your consent to process Personal Information for the new purpose(s). Bench International retains your Personal Information for as long as needed or permitted considering the legitimate business purpose(s) for which it was obtained.
The criteria used to determine our retention periods include:
- The length of time we have an ongoing relationship with you or our client (e.g., for as long as you may wish to continue using the Services).
- A period beyond the time of the ongoing relationship if we have a legitimate internal operations need, such as a need to retain such information for analysis, record-keeping and compliance with data retention schedules.
- Whether there is a legal obligation to which we are subject (for example, certain laws require us to keep records of your transactions for a certain period before we can delete them), or
- Whether retention is advisable considering our legal position (such as regarding applicable statutes of limitations, litigation or regulatory investigations).
Bench International does not store cookies locally on its website, nor does Bench International’s Hosting Provider (“WP Engine”) store cookies on the U.S. server where Bench International’s site resides.
Bench International uses the industry standard Google Analytics behavior profiling which truncates IP data before it enters our analytics. Examples of the items of data collected include your operating system, your browser, your IP address, the Bench International web page you accessed and the time and date of your visit. The information generated by the text file (cookie) about the use of the website will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of our website, compiling reports on website activity for website operators and providing other services relating to website usage and internet usage. Google may also transfer this information to third parties when required to do so by law. For cookie measurement of user interactions, Google Analytics provides “website owners JavaScript tags (libraries) to record information about the page a user has seen, for example the URL of the page. The Google Analytics JavaScript libraries use cookies to “remember” what a user has done on previous pages / interactions with the website.”
Our hosting provider’s (WP Engine) platform dynamically inspects traffic, looking for new kinds of attacks, or patterns of requests from certain locations that indicate nefarious activity, and our hosting provider blocks many of those attacks automatically. WP Engine witnesses traffic across their entire network of customers, serving over 2 billion hits a day, and those learnings are inherited automatically by all of their customers. WP Engine blocks over 150 million bad requests every month, and they are constantly adding new rules as attackers evolve their tactics. As such, WP Engine’s rules evolve constantly to meet these challenges.
WP Engine’s security systems are designed to proactively block numerous web application attack issues which may arise in WordPress sites. WP Engine’s platform proactively blocks many of these flaws at both the nginx layer as well as within WordPress itself. WP Engine maintains a specific set of configuration files for patching any WordPress security issues as they arise.
Bench International’s Website may contain links to other websites that are neither owned nor operated by Bench International. We encourage you to carefully review the privacy policies and practices of such other websites, as Bench International cannot control nor are we responsible for privacy policies or practices of third-party websites.
WP Engine’s security systems are designed to proactively block numerous web application attack issues which may arise in WordPress sites. WP Engine’s platform proactively blocks many of these flaws at both the nginx layer as well as within WordPress itself. WP Engine maintains a specific set of configuration files for patching any WordPress security issues as they arise.
Your Personal Information may be collected, used, processed, disclosed, and transferred to and within the United States and other countries where we have offices or in which we engage service providers. By using our Services, you understand that your Personal Information may be transferred to countries outside of your country of residence, which may have different data protection rules than your country. For more detailed information in this regard, please refer to the section “Disclosure and Cross-Border Transfer of Personal Information” set forth previously in this Privacy Notice.
- Bench International does not share information amongst corporate affiliates or utilize third parties in connection with any market research projects, nor does Bench International engage in any validation processes such as “pay-per-click,” “pay per call,” or “push to talk” advertising listings or related programs.
- If Bench International is legally required by law to disclose your Personal Information in response to requests from regulators, law enforcement or security agencies, we will al-ways assess the legitimacy of such request(s) before complying and will limit the dis-closure of Personal Information to that required to comply with such request.
As we continue to provide additional services and as the privacy laws and regulations evolve, it may be necessary to revise or update this Privacy Notice. We encourage you to review this Privacy Notice from time to time, as you return to our Website, so that you are familiar with any changes.
If you have any questions or concerns about this Privacy Notice or the practice of our website, please contact our Data Protection Administrator, at privacy@benchinternational.com or by mail:
Attn: Data Protection Administrator
888 Prospect Street, #200
La Jolla, California 92037
United States
This Privacy Notice as last updated in November 2024.