How to Get Your Interview Recording Deleted

If you want a recorded interview or a proctored assessment session deleted, the request almost always has to go to the employer, not to the platform that recorded you. HackerRank, HireVue, and Greenhouse all say so in their own published policies: they process candidate data on the employer's instructions, and a deletion request sent to them gets forwarded or refused. The platform holds the file. The employer decides what happens to it.

That single fact determines whether your request goes anywhere. This guide covers who to address it to, which legal deadline you can cite, what "deleted" turns out to mean once the request is honored, and which parts of your interview survive it. It is a reading of public vendor policies and statutes as of 18 September 2026, not legal advice.

Work out which recording you mean

"My interview recording" usually refers to one of four different artifacts, held by different parties under different rules. Naming the right one is the difference between a request that gets actioned and one that gets closed as unclear.

• A one-way or AI-led video interview. Video and audio of you answering prompts, plus a transcript and scores. Held by an interview vendor on the employer's behalf.
• A proctored assessment session. Code submissions, event logs, webcam snapshots or video, and integrity flags. Held by an assessment platform.
• A live meeting recording or AI notetaker transcript. Produced during a Zoom, Meet, or Teams call, often by a bot the recruiter added. We cover what each meeting tool captures and how to decline in the guide to AI notetakers in live job interviews.
• Derived records. Scorecards, rubric ratings, recruiter notes, and transcript excerpts pasted into the applicant tracking system. These are text, they are cheap to keep, and they are the ones most likely to outlive the video.

Ask for all of them by name. A request that says "please delete my video" leaves the transcript and the scorecard in place, and the scorecard is what a recruiter actually reads.

Why the platform tells you to go away

Under the GDPR the party that decides why and how data are processed is the controller; the party processing on its instructions is the processor. In US privacy law the equivalent split is business and service provider. In hiring, the employer is nearly always the controller, and the assessment or interview vendor is the processor.

The vendors say this plainly. HackerRank's privacy policy states that when you are a candidate, "the Employer inviting you or granting you access to our Services is the 'data controller' and HackerRank is the 'data processor'" (HackerRank privacy policy). Its GDPR documentation for customers is more specific about what that means for you: "Candidates must contact the company that administered the test to request updates or deletion of their personal data or test attempts" (HackerRank GDPR FAQs).

HireVue draws the same line. Its privacy notice excludes what it calls Customer Candidate Data from its own policy — that data "is instead governed by the contractual data processing terms we have agreed with those customers" — and tells candidates who want to exercise data protection rights to "contact the relevant customer to whom you have applied directly" (HireVue privacy policy). What HireVue records and scores in the first place is covered separately in our breakdown of what a HireVue interview captures.

Greenhouse, where the resulting scorecard usually lands, is the bluntest of the three: "Greenhouse's customer contracts require us to redirect inquiries relating to the Personal Information we process on behalf of a customer back to that customer without taking any action on the request" (Greenhouse privacy policy).

California's Attorney General says the same thing from the regulator's side. Its CCPA guidance notes that if you submit a request to a service provider rather than the business, "the service provider may deny the request. You must submit your request to the business itself" (California Office of the Attorney General).

None of this is the vendor being evasive. A processor that deleted data on a stranger's say-so would be breaking its contract with the employer. It does mean that the hour you spend finding a vendor's privacy email is usually wasted.

The exception worth checking

Some interview companies are not processors. A vendor that sources candidates itself, runs its own interview, and sells the assessment onward is making its own decisions about your data, and its policy will read differently.

Karat is a useful example. Its privacy policy describes collecting "photos, videos and/or audio recordings" from technical interviews and tells you to "submit a request by emailing us at [email protected]" rather than routing you to the hiring company (Karat privacy policy). Marketplaces and staffing intermediaries that interview you before any employer is involved often sit in the same position.

You can tell which you are dealing with in about a minute. Open the vendor's privacy policy and search for "on behalf of", "processor", or "service provider". If those phrases describe your interview data, write to the employer. If the policy accepts rights requests at its own address without conditioning them on the customer, write to the vendor, and copy the employer anyway.

Which deadline you can cite

Deadlines depend on where you are and where the job is, and the strongest lever is often a narrow statute rather than a general privacy law.

Two details in that table do real work.

The first is that California's employment carve-out is gone. The state's guidance confirms that "the exemptions for employment-related personal information ... expired on December 31, 2022", so an applicant now has the same deletion right as a customer, and a business must "tell their service providers to do the same" (California Office of the Attorney General). The response clock is 45 days, extendable to 90 if the business notifies you.

The second is that the Illinois statute reaches further than any general privacy law. Section 15 requires that "upon request from the applicant, employers, within 30 days after receipt of the request, must delete an applicant's interviews and instruct any other persons who received copies of the applicant video interviews to also delete the videos, including all electronically generated backup copies. Any other such person shall comply with the employer's instructions" (820 ILCS 42). Backups and downstream copies are named explicitly, which is unusual. The scope is narrow — an Illinois-based position, a video interview, AI analysis — but where it applies it is the most useful sentence available to a candidate.

Under the GDPR, the ground you are most likely relying on is Article 17(1)(a): the data "are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed" (Article 17). Once you have been rejected, the selection purpose has ended, and the employer has to justify any further retention. Article 12(3) sets the reply at "without undue delay and in any event within one month of receipt of the request", extendable "by two further months where necessary" if you are told why (Article 12).

If you are outside those three regimes, you are asking rather than requiring. That still works more often than candidates expect, particularly before a recording has been distributed internally. What the employer must tell you about its AI in the first place is a separate question, covered in our guide to AI hiring disclosure rules and what candidates are entitled to know.

What "deleted" actually means

Honored requests rarely produce the outcome candidates picture.

Anonymization is a common substitute. HackerRank's documentation describes bulk candidate deletion as a process where "the system anonymizes the data within 14 days" of receiving the request and candidate list (HackerRank GDPR FAQs). The submission and the score continue to exist, detached from your name. That satisfies most privacy obligations and it is not the same as the file being destroyed.

Copies scatter early. A recording that was played in a debrief, exported to an ATS, or pasted into a hiring channel now lives in several systems, each with its own retention setting. Only the Illinois statute names downstream copies and backups directly, which is why enumerating recipients in your request matters even where that statute does not apply.

Retention periods are usually undefined. Neither HireVue nor Karat publishes a fixed period for interview media. HireVue stores personal information "for as long as is necessary for the purpose for which it was collected", and Karat retains data "for as long as you have an open account with us or as otherwise necessary to provide you with our Services". Open-ended language means the answer depends on a contract you cannot see, so ask for the specific period in your request.

Some records are legally required to stay. The EEOC's recordkeeping guidance states that "EEOC Regulations require that employers keep all personnel or employment records for one year", and where a discrimination charge has been filed, related records must be preserved "until the final disposition of the charge or any lawsuit based on the charge" (EEOC recordkeeping requirements). A US employer refusing to delete an application record inside that window is not stonewalling you.

Write the request so it cannot be bounced

Send it to the employer's privacy contact — usually privacy@ or the address named in its candidate privacy notice — and copy the recruiter you dealt with, so the request is attached to a person who remembers your application.

Include:

• your full name, the email address you applied with, the role, and the requisition or application number;
• the date of each session and the name of every platform involved, including the meeting tool if a bot was present;
• an explicit list of artifacts: video, audio, transcript, webcam images, proctoring logs, scorecards, and recruiter notes;
• the legal basis you are relying on, if one applies, with its deadline;
• a request that the employer instruct its processors and any internal recipients to delete their copies;
• a request for written confirmation of what was deleted, what was anonymized instead, and what was retained and why.

The last item is the one that changes the reply. An employer that will not delete everything will usually tell you what it kept once you ask in a form that expects an itemized answer, and that answer tells you what still exists.

If the stage also involved an identity check, name those records too. Government ID images and selfie captures are held under separate retention settings from the interview itself.

When to bother

Deletion is worth pursuing when a recording carries something you would not want circulating — a disclosed health condition or accommodation, a visible home environment, an ID document, or a session you believe was scored unfairly and want removed from a vendor's ongoing dataset. It is worth less when the concern is generic discomfort at having been recorded, because the scorecard is the artifact that follows you internally, and it is the cheapest thing for an employer to keep.

The realistic outcome of a well-formed request is partial: the video goes, the score is anonymized, a note remains in the ATS, and you receive a description of what happened. That is still a better position than not knowing. And it is easier to be specific about what you want removed if you knew what was being captured before the session started — the same data-flow questions run in reverse in our candidate checklist for AI interview assistant privacy, which is worth reading in either direction before your next recorded interview.