Applying hands over more than a CV: identity, right-to-work copies, interview notes, test scores, sometimes a recorded interview. Hired or not, the file commonly stays for the window in which you could bring a claim, and often longer as a talent pool you never asked to join.
An application file leaked is your identity documents beside what an interviewer wrote about you and the scores a machine gave you. You were never hired, and they still had it.
More than the CV
An application file collects your CV, identity and right-to-work copies, interview notes, test results, and the correspondence around them. Increasingly, software reads it first: applications are ranked and scored before a person sees them, and the scores sit in the file. An access request reaches the notes and the scores.
Rejected is not deleted
The stated reason to keep an unsuccessful application is the window in which you could bring a claim; the regulator's line is not to keep it beyond that. The quiet extension is the talent pool: kept for future roles unless you object, on a timescale they choose.
The interview that was also a capture
If your interview ran through a recording platform, your face and voice were captured and often scored by the platform's software. That trade has its own fine print.
READ · The video interview fine print what the platforms keep, for how long, and who decidesTwo kinds of hold. LAW SETS IT: a statute makes them keep it. THEY SET IT: a period the company grants itself.
DBS code of practice: destroy the certificate information once the decision is made.
Guidance, not statute: keep no longer than a rejected candidate could bring a claim.
A new purpose they notify you of; the timescale is their choice.
Checks and social-media findings are destroyed once the process completes; the outcome can be kept.
Where you stand changes the calculus, and the timing is yours.
Waiting on an answer: a request now lands on the same desk that is deciding your application; the right exists at any moment, but whether to use it before the answer is a judgment only you can make.
Rejected, or no response and you consider it closed: this is the clean moment. The file's job is done, you cannot verify what remains, and a deletion request is the standard move. Whatever they claim in reply, the reply is theirs and the record is yours.
If you took the job, you are an applicant no longer: the employment file is its own fine print.
The employment fine print →Their own policy is the one that binds them. Pin it down with a request, and keep the reply. Start your record →