What is a ‘cookie’?
Cookies are files that are downloaded to your device whenever you visit a website. Cookies contain small amounts of information that are sent back to the originating website on each visit thereafter or to another website that recognises that cookie.
Cookies have lots of different purposes. For example, they can allow you to navigate through pages more efficiently – remembering your preferences, enable you to see adverts and other information that is more relevant to you and generally improve your website experience.
Cookies are used by nearly all websites and do not harm your devices. If you want to check or change what type of cookies you allow, you should be able to change this within your browser settings. You should also be able to view cookies that have been saved on your behalf, delete them and also prevent third party websites from saving and reading your cookie data.
How do we use cookies?
At HFG we use cookies to do the following:
- Track your use of the website
We can use cookies to identify any patterns in how pages are visited and to identify a user’s experience of the site. We use this information to develop and improve our website and services with regards to our visitors needs and requirements.
- To help us advertise relevant jobs to you and display other relevant information
By using cookies we can display jobs and other information that we think you’ll be interested in, meaning that you’ll be able to spend less time hunting for the information or job that you are looking for.
There are four main types of cookies that are used:
• Category 1: strictly necessary cookies
• Category 2: performance cookies
• Category 3: functionality cookies
• Category 4: targeting cookies or advertising cookies
Category 1 - Strictly necessary cookies
These cookies are essential to enable you to move around the website and use its features easily; especially for accessing secure areas of the website. Without these cookies some services you have asked for like registering for job alerts or responses, cannot be provided.
The HFG website uses this type of cookie
Category 2 - Performance cookies
These cookies collect information about how visitors use a website. For example which pages are visited most frequently and if any error messages occur. These cookies don’t collect information that identifies a visitor and all of the information collected by these cookies is aggregated and therefore anonymous. It is only used to improve how a website works.
By using our website and online services, you agree that we can place these types of cookies on your device.
Category 3 - Functionality cookies
Functionality cookies allow our website to remember choices that you have made to improve your user experience. These choices could include your user name and password and any part of the website that you have been able to customise to your own personal settings such as: changes to text size, fonts and services that you have asked for such as watching a video or commenting on a blog.
The information that these cookies collect may be anonymous and they cannot track your activity on other websites.
By using our website and online services, you agree that we can place these types of cookies on your device.
Category 4 - targeting cookies or advertising cookies
These cookies are used to deliver relevant adverts and information to you. They can also limit the number of times that you see an advertisement and help to measure the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. These cookies can remember if you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organisations such as advertisers. Quite often targeting or advertising cookies will be linked to site functionality provided by the other organisations.
The HFG website has links to other websites and once you access another site through a link that we have provided it is the responsibility of that site to provide information as to how they use cookies on their site. We use the following social media channels that may put these types of cookies on your device:
• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Google+
Please refer to their sites for more information about how they individually use your cookie data.
You can find more information about cookies by visiting www.allaboutcookies.org or www.aboutcookies.org the ICO also have some information about cookie usage on their site: https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/online/cookies/