Privacy Policy | VisaJobs Ireland

Who we are

VisaJobs Ireland ("we", "us") operates visajobs.ie, a website that aggregates Irish employment permit data published by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and job listings from third-party sources. Our registered contact email is hello@visajobs.ie.

What data we collect

We collect the following categories of personal data:

Account data: email address and password hash when you create an account.
Profile data (optional): if you choose to build a profile, we collect your name, phone number, the city and county you are based in, a headline, and a link to your LinkedIn profile.
Immigration and permission data (optional): your current Irish permission or stamp type, the date it expires, the country or countries whose citizenship you hold, and whether you would need sponsorship. We ask for this because matching you to employers who can genuinely sponsor you is the purpose of this service.
Work history and education (optional): roles, employers, dates, qualifications, institutions, grades, and the country where you studied.
CV or resume (optional): the file you upload, if you upload one.
Saved preferences: jobs and companies you save, application tracker entries, cover letters you generate, target sectors, counties, and salary expectations.
Search queries: anonymised search terms and filter selections to improve relevance.
Usage analytics: page views, device type, and referrer via Vercel Analytics and PostHog (no cookies, IP-anonymised).
Authentication cookies: session tokens stored in secure, HTTP-only cookies to keep you signed in.

Everything beyond account data is optional. You can use the site, search jobs, and read permit data without providing any of it. You only need your immigration details if you want to apply to an employer through VisaJobs.

We do not ask for your gender, ethnicity, religion, health, sexual orientation, or any other special category data under Article 9 of GDPR. Some job boards collect this for equal opportunity reporting. We have no such reporting obligation, so we do not collect it. We also do not ask for your full home address, your passport number, or your PPS number.

How we use your data

To provide and personalise the service (saved jobs, tracker, AI writer).
To authenticate your sessions.
To improve search results and surface relevant listings.
To match you to roles you are actually eligible for, using your permission type and expiry date.
To pass your application to an employer when you choose to apply.
To monitor site performance and fix errors.

We do not sell your data. We do not serve third-party advertising.

Applying to jobs, and what employers see

Nothing in your profile is shared with an employer unless you apply to one of their roles. Applying is always your decision, and you make it one job at a time.

When you apply, the employer who posted that role receives your name and contact details, your CV and message if you provided them, your work history and education, your skills, and your current permission type and expiry date. They need the immigration details to know whether they can lawfully hire you and what it would involve.

We take a copy of your profile at the moment you apply and attach it to that application. This is deliberate. If you later update your profile, the employer still sees what you actually sent them on the day, rather than a version that has since changed. It protects both sides from a record that quietly rewrites itself.

Employers cannot browse or search candidate profiles today. If we introduce that, it will be opt-in through a visibility setting on your profile, and we will tell you before it launches.

Your profile history

When you change something in your profile, we keep a record of what changed and when. When you remove a job or a qualification, it stops appearing on your profile and stops counting toward your matches, but the underlying record is retained rather than erased immediately.

We keep this history for two reasons:

To improve how we match candidates to roles. A permission renewed on schedule over several years is useful context that a single snapshot of today cannot show.
So that applications you have already sent remain an accurate record of what you sent.

You can ask us for a copy of this history at any time. It is never shown to employers as a change log. In particular, we do not show an employer the sequence of immigration statuses you have held, because that can reveal things about your personal and family circumstances that have no place in a hiring decision. Employers see your current status, which is what they need in order to make an offer.

If you delete your account, or ask us to erase your data, this history is deleted along with everything else. It is not kept as a shadow copy. See Data retention below.

Matching and ranking

We use your profile to score how well you fit a role, based on your skills, your permission to work, location, sector, salary expectation, and experience. This decides the order in which roles are shown to you, and how your application is ranked alongside others.

This is a ranking aid, not a decision. No hiring outcome is decided automatically. Every decision to interview, reject, or hire is made by a person at the employer, who sees your full application regardless of how it scored. Under Article 22 of GDPR you have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, and no such decision is made here.

Where our scoring identifies that a role is not open to you at all, for example because your current permission does not allow employment, we tell you rather than quietly filtering you out.

Legal basis (GDPR)

We process your data under:

Contract: account data and saved preferences are necessary to provide the service you signed up for. Your profile and immigration details are necessary to match you to eligible roles and to pass an application to an employer when you ask us to.
Legitimate interest: anonymised analytics help us improve the site without identifying you. Retaining your profile history lets us improve matching quality and keeps sent applications accurate, which is why we explain it in full above rather than burying it.
Consent: where applicable, we ask for your consent before setting non-essential cookies.

Immigration status is personal data but is not a special category under Article 9. We still treat it carefully, because it is sensitive in practice even where it is not sensitive in law.

Cookies

We use the following cookies:

Authentication cookies (essential): secure session tokens. These are required for login and cannot be disabled.
Cookie consent preference (essential): remembers whether you accepted or declined non-essential cookies.
Vercel Analytics (non-essential): privacy-friendly, cookieless analytics. No personal data is collected.
Vercel Speed Insights (non-essential): measures page load performance. No personal data is collected.
Google Analytics (non-essential): used for traffic analysis. Subject to your cookie consent. See Google's privacy policy.
PostHog (non-essential): product analytics to understand feature usage. No personal data is collected.

Data storage and security

Account data is stored in a Supabase-managed PostgreSQL database. Passwords are hashed and never stored in plain text. All data is transmitted over HTTPS. We retain your data for as long as your account is active.

Data retention

We keep your account data, your profile, and your profile history for as long as your account is active.

If you delete your account, or ask us to erase your data, we delete all of it. That includes your profile, your work history and education, and the full change history described above, including entries you had previously removed from your profile. None of it is kept as an archived or anonymised shadow copy. This happens within 30 days.

The one exception is applications you have already sent. An employer has a legitimate record of having received an application, so rather than deleting those outright we strip them of anything that identifies you and sever the link to your account. The employer keeps their hiring record; you are no longer identifiable from it.

Anonymised, aggregated analytics data may be retained indefinitely as it cannot be linked back to you.

International transfers

Some of our service providers (Supabase, Vercel, PostHog) may process data outside the EEA. Where this occurs, transfers are covered by Standard Contractual Clauses or the provider's adequacy framework, in compliance with GDPR Chapter V.

Third-party services

Supabase: authentication and database hosting.
Amazon Web Services (S3): storage for CV and resume files. The bucket is private, files are never publicly accessible, and access is granted per request only to an employer you have applied to.
Vercel: website hosting, analytics, and performance monitoring.
Sanity: blog content management.
PostHog: product analytics.
Google Analytics: traffic analysis (only with cookie consent).
Anthropic: AI-powered cover letter generation. Content you submit is processed but not stored by Anthropic.

These providers process data on our behalf under their own privacy policies and GDPR-compliant data processing agreements.

Your rights

Under GDPR, you have the right to:

Access the personal data we hold about you, including your full profile change history.
Correct inaccurate data.
Delete your account and all associated data, including that history.
Export your data in a portable format.
Object to or restrict processing.
Withdraw consent at any time.
Lodge a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission.

To exercise any of these rights, email hello@visajobs.ie.

Children

Our service is not directed at anyone under the age of 16. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe we have collected data from a child, please contact us and we will delete it promptly.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be communicated via the website. The "last updated" date at the top reflects the most recent revision.