How Long They Keep Your AI Interview Video, and How to Get It Deleted

What Happens to the Recording Right Now?

Nothing, unless you ask. The video sits on a vendor's server under whatever schedule the employer set, and federal recordkeeping law puts a floor under that schedule rather than a ceiling on it. Under 29 CFR 1602.14, an employer preserves application and hiring records for one year from the date of the record or the personnel action, whichever is later, and a filed discrimination charge extends that duty until the charge reaches final disposition ⁵.

A federal contractor keeps the same records longer: two years, or one year if the contractor has fewer than 150 employees or no government contract of at least $150,000 ⁶. Neither rule is a deletion right. Both set how briefly a record may be kept, and a schedule written around them tends to sit above that minimum, because storage is cheap and a legal hold can arrive without warning.

Three separate regimes sit on top of that floor, and which one reaches you turns on where the job is based and where you live:

• Illinois: a 30-day deletion right that reaches the vendor's copies too
• California: a CCPA delete request, narrower, with named exceptions
• Everywhere else: the retention schedule above, and nothing forcing it shorter

None of these three is automatic. Illinois and California both require you to ask first, and outside them there is no deletion mechanism to invoke at all, only the schedule sitting above. What decides it is the position and the applicant, not the employer's mailing address: Illinois' Act is written for positions based in Illinois ¹, and the CCPA's rights belong to California residents, job applicants among them ⁴.

Send the Illinois Request

Illinois wrote a deletion clock for exactly this recording. Its Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act, in force since January 1, 2020, requires that on request, an employer destroy your interview within 30 days and instruct anyone who received a copy, including the AI vendor, to delete their backup copies too ¹. It covers video interviews an employer ran an AI analysis on, for a position based in Illinois, and nothing starts until you ask. The request needs no special language.

The same Act already required your consent before any AI program analyzed the recording in the first place, and it bars evaluating an applicant who withheld that consent ². The Act names no penalty and no enforcement agency for an employer that ignores a deletion request, so this right exists on paper a step ahead of existing in practice. Send it anyway. Keep the date you sent it, and follow up once if 30 days pass with no answer, citing the Act by its short name.

A short list of what belongs in the request:

• The job title and the date you interviewed
• A plain statement asking for deletion under the Act
• Where to send confirmation, if the employer offers it

Skip the lawyer and the formal letter. A short email to the recruiter or the address on the original interview invite is enough to count as the request, and keeping your own sent copy is the only proof you'll likely need if 30 days pass and you want to follow up.

Ask California for the Narrower Version

California gets you a real request, just a smaller one. The exemption that used to keep job-applicant data outside the CCPA expired on December 31, 2022, so since January 1, 2023 a California resident applying for work has the same delete right any other California consumer has: ask, and the business must delete the personal information it collected from you ³⁴.

That right has named exceptions, and the one that matters most here is a business's duty to comply with a legal obligation, which covers a record the employer has to preserve for a pending claim or an open charge ³. If nothing like that applies to your file, the exception has nothing to hold onto and the deletion goes through as asked.

California's request is also not limited to a video the way Illinois' is. The statute's own words are personal information the business "has collected from the consumer" ³, so it reaches what you handed over across the whole application rather than the interview file alone, and that is broader ground worth using. Note the other edge of the same wording: it is what you provided, not everything a file might contain. If a privacy notice you were shown also mentioned using your application to improve a model, that's a separate question worth reading through on its own before you decide exactly what to ask the employer to delete.

Don't Stop at the Employer's Copy

The employer is rarely the only place the video lives. Most one-way video platforms are run by a separate vendor, so the file you want gone usually sits on a system the hiring team does not run. Both statutes account for that, which changes what you ask for more than it changes who you ask.

Each one pushes the request downstream, in different words. Illinois' Act has the employer instruct anyone who received a copy, the AI vendor included, to delete it, backups too ¹. California's runs through the business the same way: on a verifiable request it must delete and notify its service providers and contractors to delete, except where that proves impossible or takes disproportionate effort, and a service provider need not act on a request a consumer sends it directly ³. The employer is the right address in both.

It helps to ask this question earlier than most people think to. If the interview invite names the vendor by product, a quick search usually turns up that vendor's own privacy page, which will say plainly whether it retains recordings on its own schedule independent of the employer's. That is worth knowing before you sit down for the interview, not after.

If you never get to the deletion question because the interview is still ahead of you, what an employer is told to disclose before recording your screen or your face covers the same consent and retention ground, from their side of it, and reading it tells you what a well-run process should already be offering before you have to ask for anything.

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