We read the lot
The interview software trade produces two kinds of writing. The sales page, which is loud: interview scoring, automated summaries, fraud detection, predictive assessments. And the privacy policy, which is quiet. We read the policies of ten of the most popular video-interview and assessment platforms, the ones a candidate is most likely to be sent into, and then we read the sales pages of the same companies. They do not describe the same product.
You do not choose these platforms. An employer chooses them, and you perform for them, on camera, under time pressure, because saying no costs you the job. We covered that side of it in the interview before the interview: the heaviest handovers sit exactly where refusing is most expensive. This issue is about the paperwork underneath, because the paperwork is where the trade tells on itself.
Half of them won't say what the software does
Half the policies never mention AI at all. Not transcription, not scoring, not analysis. Silence, in a document whose whole job is to say what happens to your data.
Silence would at least be consistent if the products were simple recorders. They are not. Several of the silent companies sell machine judgment on their own marketing pages, by name: interview scoring, automated interview notes, fraud detection, predictive assessments. The capability is a headline on one page of the website and absent from the other. A recorded interview can be scored without a word of it appearing in the policy, and in half this trade, that is the arrangement.
The candid ones prove the quiet ones have something to be quiet about. One platform's policy says plainly that it uses your test results "to predict certain technical abilities or expertise" and may use "automated means" to infer "your likely preferences or other characteristics", and that results can reach prospective employers. Another admits "AI-assisted analysis of your responses" on the hiring company's instructions. The capability is ordinary across the trade. The disclosure is not.
The clock runs whether you got the job or not
Where a policy states a retention period at all, the spread is wide. One deletes candidate data eight weeks after the process ends. Another holds it twelve months by default. Another defaults to two years. One says, in as many words, that data is stored for an indefinite time. Several give no number at all, only the phrase every policy reaches for when it means "as long as we like": for as long as necessary.
Most of the trade declares itself a processor: the recording exists on the employer's instructions, and the employer decides when it dies. That is not a technicality. It means the rejection email does not end anything. The video of your face, your voice, your accent, your home over your shoulder, sits on a vendor's servers on a clock you never see, set by a company that stopped replying to you, whether you got the job or not.
"Incidentally present"
A form collects what you type. A camera collects what you are. One policy says the quiet part carefully: the platform does not request special category data, but it "may be incidentally present" in your interview. Your face, your accent, a visible disability, religious dress. Incidental is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because the recording does not become less revealing for being unrequested.
Others simply deny the category exists. Two policies state flatly that they do not collect special category data while operating a product that records faces. One of them goes further: it lists what interview video may reveal, age, race, sex among it, and then disclaims processing those things. The list and the disclaimer sit in the same paragraph, and only one of them is a fact about the video.
The bug becomes the record
Read the public candidate reviews of this trade's platforms and a pattern appears that the policies never anticipate: the software malfunctions, and the malfunction is scored. Candidates describe editors flagging correct code as broken and eating half an hour of a timed session, correct solutions scored at half marks, recordings lost outright by the platform with a retake as the remedy. Reviewers note that passing can depend on knowing the platform's scoring system, which is a skill no job requires.
Now put that next to what the policies say happens to scores. On one model, results predict your abilities and can reach future employers. On the other, the score goes into the employer's file, and more than one platform then keeps working the data after the process ends, "anonymised" for its own statistical analysis, by a method no policy describes. A number produced in a glitchy browser session on a Tuesday can outlive the vacancy, the rejection, and your memory of the interview.
And nowhere in these policies is there a procedure for challenging the number. Not one describes how a candidate disputes a score. The trade has built machinery for producing judgments and none for correcting them, which tells you exactly how often anyone asks.
The one question they have to answer
Here is the asymmetry in full. The software asked you everything: your face, your voice, your work, your time, your composure under a countdown. In return, half the policies will not say what the software does, most will not say how long they keep you, and none will say how to challenge what they concluded. It asked you everything. It answers nothing.
Except there is one question this trade is built to receive and legally obliged to answer, and it is the one almost no candidate sends. A request for your file. Because most of these platforms answer to the employer, the request goes to the company you applied to, and the platform's copy rides on it: the recording, the transcript, and anything scored, rated, or derived from them. What comes back is dated and in writing. If a score in it is wrong, the same law that got you the file lets you ask for the record to be corrected, and if the answer to deletion is "we anonymised it", that claim goes on the record too. The full playbook for the process itself, including the questions to ask before the camera turns on, is in issue 24.
None of this gets you the job. It gets the one document this trade produces that you are allowed to read, and it puts the interview on your record instead of only theirs.
Start the record
You performed. They filed it. DÆTRAX is where your side of the file lives: log the platform and the employer who chose it, draft the request in plain English, send it from your own inbox, and let the reply, the claim, or the silence land against a date. The trade asks everything and answers nothing. Make it answer once. Start your record →