Send the Preservation Request Before the Complaint

Why Does Timing Decide What Survives?

Because the file has an expiry date nobody told you about. HireVue's candidate FAQ says the vendor stores a candidate's personal data for a retention period chosen by the company that candidate interviewed with, and that it purges the data automatically once that period expires ¹. The page gives no default, no minimum and no maximum, so the length of your window is unknown to you unless the employer says.

The same FAQ is direct about who decides. HireVue says it does not determine whether or when data is deleted, and that the company applied to does ¹.

HireVue is documenting its own retention behaviour there, which is not an audit of it.

Your assessment probably produced more than a video. There is a transcript, the questions as they were served, the timestamps, and whatever went back to the recruiter as a result. Those pieces need not share one retention rule (the Illinois Act below covers only the video), so a request naming only the recording may be answered honestly while the rest ages out. Name the set instead. What employers are told to get from an assessment vendor covers the same records from the employer's side, legal hold included.

The clock is already running.

Send the Preservation Request First

Write to the employer before you write to anyone else, because the employer holds the clock. One short message does the work. Give the role and any requisition number, the date and time of the interview, and the platform, then ask that the recording, transcript, questions and any resulting scores be preserved while your concern is open.

• Say: I am raising a concern about the assessment for this role on this date, and ask that all records of it be preserved until the matter is resolved.
• Say: please confirm in writing that the recording, the transcript and any scores are on hold.
• Not: any request to delete, close or remove, until you are finished.
• Not: the substance of the complaint, if you have not settled it yet. Preservation does not depend on it.

Send it to a named person and keep the copy you sent. Recruiting inboxes rotate, roles close, and the person who ran your interview can be gone before your complaint is written. A dated message in a thread is worth more later than an accurate memory of a phone call.

Ask for written confirmation of the hold.

An employer is not obliged to grant a hold by any platform page quoted here, and no statute in this article creates one either; an employer's own recordkeeping rules are a separate question. What the request does is narrower and still useful. It fixes the date you asked, it names the records you care about, and it shows the company was told. The ambition ends there. A preservation request is a piece of housekeeping, not an accusation, and it reads better when it is written that way.

Don't Send a Deletion Request Yet

A deletion request and a challenge ask for opposite things. Illinois shows how completely: on an applicant's request, the employer must delete that applicant's interviews within 30 days and instruct everyone who received copies, the AI vendor included, to delete theirs ³. Backup copies fall under the same instruction, and the recipients have to comply ³.

That is the right you want later, not now. The Act is request-triggered rather than automatic, and it sets no form, no deadline for an acknowledgment, and no proof of deletion ³. It names no penalty and no enforcement agency for a refusal ³.

Its scope is the videos themselves. Scores, transcripts, notes and the inferences drawn from them sit outside it, and it reaches only employers who ask for recorded video interviews and then run an AI analysis of them, for positions based in Illinois ³.

Narrow enough to sound safe, wide enough to take the file.

When the matter is closed, how to get your AI interview video deleted covers the request itself and the places where it exists.

One more thing is worth knowing while the file sits there. Section 10 of the same Act says an employer may not share applicant videos except with persons whose expertise or technology is necessary in order to evaluate an applicant's fitness for a position ⁴. The statute defines none of those terms, and it carves out nothing for training data, marketing or curiosity. It carries no penalty of its own, so a breach gives you a sentence to quote rather than a claim to file ⁴.

Where Can You Get Your Own Copy?

From the employer, and only where a law or its own policy gives you a route. HireVue's help center says that after completing an interview a candidate has no direct access to review the recording through the platform ². Anyone who wants to see a submission is told to contact the hiring company, which controls the recordings and decides whether to provide access ².

That is platform behaviour, not a statement about your rights.

In the EU and the EEA, a subject access request under Article 15(1)(h) of the GDPR runs against the employer as controller, and it reaches the automated part of the decision. Where automated decision-making including profiling within Article 22(1) and (4) exists, you are entitled to be told so, and to meaningful information about the logic involved, its significance, and the envisaged consequences for you ⁵.

That trigger is the narrow one. The words 'at least in those cases' have been read more broadly by some authorities, and that wider reading is not settled here ⁵.

It is a right against the controller holding the data, which is the employer or the agency, not against the AI vendor ⁵. Access can also be limited where handing it over would adversely affect the rights of others ⁵.

In New York City the route is narrower and still worth using. Administrative Code 20-871(b)(3) gives a candidate a written-request right, answerable within 30 days, for information the employer has not already published on its website ⁶. It returns the type of data collected for the automated employment decision tool, the source of that data, and the employer's data retention policy ⁶.

The disclosure goes no further. Not the model, not your own score, not the weightings, not the audit ⁶.

If the concern is discrimination rather than a mistake, where to report an AI hiring decision you think discriminated sets out the agencies and their deadlines. A deadline is the second reason the preservation note goes out early.

Read the evidence >