An application scatters on contact: agencies, platforms and employers each hold a copy, and each points at someone else when you ask. Closure is not erasure; the file outlives the vacancy, and some of it feeds paid candidate databases.
Concentrated, shared background data. Keep the record.
Applications and background checks are kept for years, hired or not.
Screening often takes ID, right-to-work documents, and background checks.
Industry profile reviewed 23 August 2026. Also machine-readable via the free API.
A leak hands over your salary history, why you left, and what a referee said about you. It follows you into every future application, and you never see the copy that is circulating.
Everyone in the chain points at someone else
The system holding your application often says it has no direct relationship with you and sends you to each employer separately. A board treats the copies recruiters pulled as theirs now. A screening firm answers to whoever ordered the check. There is no one place to ask.
Your working life, and what you were after
A CV, salary expectations, work-authorisation status, references, sometimes checks you never see. Policies stack reasons to keep it so one always applies, and several say the account can close while the data stays.
Copies leave, and they do not come back
On a job board the database is the product: anyone who buys access can see you, including recruiters at the company you work for now. Deleting your profile does not pull back copies already taken. In the US a rejected application is kept about a year against discrimination claims; longer is their choice.
Your CV trains the thing that judges you
Most policies reserve your CV to improve and train their models, which is not the same as using it to get you a job, and scores and summaries get generated about you. A US regulator has already settled a case where hiring software auto-rejected applicants by age.
Three things survive it. One right reaches one.
A recorded interview produces the video, the numbers drawn off your face and voice, and a model trained on both. Illinois law lets you have the video destroyed, including copies passed downstream. The scores are a separate record, the model is neither, and nothing says they go when the video does.
Some of the roles are only collecting
A national law enforcement agency has warned that criminals post fake listings to harvest applicants' personal information, running a convincing interview and onboarding pack to get the identity documents and bank details a real employer asks for late on. There is no request that reaches a company that was never hiring.
Worked out from the industry, not from any one company. What you actually handed over is yours to record.
The list understates it after an interview: a recording is your face and voice as data, and the score drawn off it is a judgement about you.
Built only from what this kind of service actually collects. A dimension that the data does not support is not listed.
Disability and health can surface in checks and forms.
Salary history and credit checks imply it.
Two kinds of hold. LAW SETS IT: a statute makes them keep it. THEY SET IT: a ground the company grants itself.
Payroll, right-to-work, and pension records carry statutory retention.
Tax and company law makes them keep billing and payment records.
They can keep records to defend a live or possible legal claim.
Employment histories trade at billion-record scale: one broker's enriched profiles, about 1.2 billion of them, sat on an unsecured server. A job site left 13.7 million records open, pay and visa status included. A European regulator fined a professional network 310 million euros for profiling members to target ads.
Candidate data is shared with employers and screening partners.
CVs and assessments train scoring and matching models.
Anonymised is their word. A CV names you outright, and its writing style is a fingerprint that language models attribute at scale (Staab et al., ICLR 2024).
Fifteen demographic attributes re-identify 99.98% of Americans in a released dataset (Rocher, Hendrickx and de Montjoye, Nature Communications, 2019); date of birth, postcode, and sex alone did it for most people in the first study of the problem (Sweeney, 2000).
Language models infer where a person lives, their income, and their sex from their writing alone, at near-human accuracy and at scale (Staab et al., ICLR 2024).
A face, voice, or fingerprint template identifies a person directly; there is nothing left to anonymise, and it cannot be reissued like a password.
Browser and device fingerprints were unique for 84% of visitors in the first large study (Eckersley, 2010), and sparse histories of what people viewed re-identified them against public reviews (Narayanan and Shmatikov, 2008).
THE STUDIES Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models (Nature Communications 10, 3069, 2019)·Simple Demographics Often Identify People Uniquely (Carnegie Mellon University, Data Privacy Working Paper 3, 2000)·Beyond Memorization: Violating Privacy via Inference with Large Language Models (ICLR 2024, 2024)·How Unique Is Your Web Browser? (Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2010), 2010)·Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets (IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2008)
Clauses that recur across this industry, and what each one actually permits.
“to provide and improve our services”
The catch-all purpose. Analytics, profiling, personalisation, and increasingly AI training can all ride under it. When they want to do something new with your data, this sentence usually already covers it.
THE MOVE An objection draws the line: use your data to run the service, not to improve, target, or train on it.
“we do not sell your personal information”
Often technically true, and still misleading. It usually means no cash changes hands. Data can still flow to ad networks, analytics firms, and partners: on their definition, sharing is not selling.
THE MOVE Flip the do-not-sell switch where one exists. The written objection on top of it goes on your record.
“service providers, partners, and affiliates”
How data leaves the building with no name attached. Recipients are listed by what they do, never who they are. You cannot send a request to a company you cannot name, which is the point.
THE MOVE An access request can ask for the recipients by name, not just the categories. UK and EU law put that choice with you. The reply, or the silence, goes on your record.
“aggregated or de-identified information”
Stripping the name does not strip the pattern, and the pattern often still points at you. Policies grant themselves free, indefinite use of this data because in their telling it is no longer about you.
THE MOVE If a deletion comes back as 'anonymised', keep the reply. It is their claim, not a fact you can check.
“retained as long as necessary, or as required by law”
They can keep it for: legal duties, tax rules, fraud prevention, possible lawsuits, their own business reasons. None of them carries a firm end date. Deletion becomes a negotiation, not an event.
THE MOVE Which reasons apply to you, and how long each runs, is a request of its own. Their reply goes on your record.
“you grant us a licence to use your content”
A contract term, not a data setting, so a privacy request cannot undo it. The careful version ends with your account. The broad version can be passed on, never expires, and survives deletion.
THE MOVE Whether the licence ends with the account is written in their terms, not yours. Closing the account goes on your record.
“if you close your account, we may retain certain information for analytical purposes and recordkeeping integrity”
Closing the account does not delete the data: they can keep it for any internal purpose they judge necessary.
THE MOVE Send the deletion request separately from closing. The reply goes on your record.
“any registered company, individual recruiter, or user who purchases access can view your profile”
On a board, the database is the product. Who sees you is decided by who pays, not by where you applied, and that can include recruiters at the company you work for now.
THE MOVE Making the profile private stops new views, not old copies. A request asks who was already given access. Their reply goes on your record.
“we collect personal data under the direction of our customers and have no direct relationship with you”
The platform holding your application makes you ask each employer separately, so there is no one place to send a request.
THE MOVE Send the request to the employer and to the platform. Each reply lands on your record.
“we use candidate data, including interview recordings and assessment results, to develop and improve our models”
A recorded interview is richer material than any CV. It catches how you answer under pressure, what you did with a question you could not answer, and how you sounded doing it, none of which can be reconstructed from a document. Destroy the recording and the model that learned from it is untouched, because a trained model is not a copy of your file.
THE MOVE An objection to training is a separate request from a deletion and can be sent with one. Their reply goes on your record.
“recordings and assessment results may be retained for our legitimate business purposes”
The recording and the scoring built from it are treated as the company's own material, kept on a schedule it sets and passed to whoever ordered the assessment. One use of it is now off the table in Europe: inferring a candidate's emotions from their face or voice has been prohibited there since 2025, whatever the clause reserves.
THE MOVE The recording and the scores are two separate records, and a request can name both. Their reply goes on your record.
Their own policy is the one that binds them. Pin it down with a request, and keep the reply. Start your record →