How Long to Keep Job Applications and Interview Records

The federal floor for job applications and interview records is one year from the date of the record or the hiring decision, whichever is later. Federal contractors with 150 or more employees or a contract of at least $150,000 keep them two years. California requires four. Every one of those clocks stops the moment a discrimination charge is filed, because then you must preserve everything relevant until the matter is finally resolved. Illinois runs in the opposite direction: if an applicant asks, you have 30 days to delete an AI-analyzed video interview, including backups.

Retention is the question hiring teams ask last and regret asking last. It surfaces when someone notices that a video screening tool has been quietly accumulating recordings of every applicant for two years, or when a candidate emails asking what you still hold on them, or when a charge arrives and nobody can say with confidence where the records are.

What follows is the actual schedule, drawn from the regulations themselves, plus the two places where the rules pull in opposite directions and you have to decide which one wins. This is general information for hiring teams rather than legal advice, and a multi-state program is worth a short conversation with employment counsel.

How long do employers have to keep job applications?

One year, under the main federal rule. The EEOC regulation covering Title VII, the ADA and GINA requires employers to preserve personnel and employment records for one year from the date the record was made or the date of the personnel action involved, whichever comes later. Application forms and other records having to do with hiring are named explicitly. For a candidate you rejected in March, the clock runs from the rejection, not from the day the resume arrived.

The age discrimination rules land in the same place for applicants. Under the ADEA regulations an employer keeps job applications, resumes, and records about a failure or refusal to hire for one year from the personnel action. Payroll records are a separate three year obligation, but that only applies to people you actually employed.

Federal contractors carry a longer duty. The OFCCP rule requires a contractor to preserve records for at least two years when it has 150 or more employees or a government contract of at least $150,000. Below both of those thresholds the minimum drops back to one year. Note the structure: it is not a single test, so a small contractor with a large contract still lands in the two year bucket.

Read that table as a floor rather than a target. Nothing stops you keeping records longer, and there are decent reasons to keep some of them, but every extra month of retention is extra sensitive data about people who mostly did not get the job.

How long do employers keep interview records and recordings?

The same one year floor covers them, because a recording is a record made in connection with a hiring decision like any other. There is no separate federal retention rule for video or audio, which surprises people who expect recorded interviews to be treated as a special category. They are not. What makes them different is practical: they are large, they are sensitive, and unlike a resume they capture someone's face and voice.

In practice most teams settle somewhere between one and two years for the recording itself, and keep the transcript and the scores longer because those are small, searchable, and far more useful if you ever have to explain a decision. That split is worth considering deliberately rather than by accident. A transcript with a rubric score attached answers the question "why did this candidate not advance" much better than a video file nobody will watch, and it carries less risk in storage. The mechanics of keeping that written record are covered on our interview transcription software page.

One thing to check with any vendor: where the recordings live and who deletes them. If a platform holds candidate video on your behalf, your retention policy is only real if the vendor can actually enforce it, and if their deletion applies to backups rather than just hiding the file from your dashboard. Ask before you buy, not after.

How long should you keep interview notes?

Treat them exactly like the rest of the file: one year minimum, four in California, and preserved indefinitely once a charge lands. Interview notes are records relating to a hiring decision, and the fact that they are informal, handwritten or scribbled in a chat window does not take them outside the rule.

The more common failure with notes is not deleting them too early, it is that they are scattered. Notes live in a recruiter's notebook, a Slack thread, an email to a hiring manager and a comment field in the ATS, and no retention policy reaches all four. If your screening process produces a single structured record per candidate, the retention question becomes answerable. If it produces four fragments in four systems, it does not, and you will discover that at the worst possible moment.

Worth saying plainly: notes that would embarrass you are not fixed by deleting them on schedule. Structured scoring against written criteria produces a cleaner record than free-text impressions do, which is one of the quieter arguments for it. We wrote about what that record looks like in how AI interview scoring works.

What happens to retention when a discrimination charge is filed?

Your schedule stops applying and a preservation duty takes over. Once a charge or an action is filed under Title VII, the ADA or GINA, the regulation requires the employer to preserve all personnel records relevant to the charge until final disposition. That reaches further than the individual complainant's file: it covers records for other people holding or seeking positions similar to the one at issue, including the application materials of everyone who applied for that role.

So a charge from one rejected candidate can freeze the entire applicant pool for that requisition, recordings included. Deleting on schedule while a claim is open is the scenario every employment lawyer warns about, because the deletion itself becomes a separate problem regardless of what the records would have shown.

The hard part is operational rather than legal. A hold is only as good as your ability to find every copy, and candidate records for a single role are typically spread across the ATS, a recruiter's inbox, a shared drive, a scheduling tool and a video vendor's storage. Organizations with records scattered across that many systems often lean on a way to search every internal system at once before they can say honestly that a hold is complete. Whatever the method, decide it before you need it.

How long to keep employment applications in California

Four years, and this catches out-of-state employers regularly. California amended Government Code section 12946 through SB 807, effective January 1, 2022, extending the retention period for applicant and personnel records from two years to four. The change was made to line up with the four year window candidates now have to bring a claim under the Fair Employment and Housing Act.

If a complaint is filed with California's Civil Rights Department, the related records must be kept until the employer is notified the matter is fully resolved, or until the deadline for filing a civil action has passed, whichever is later. Same pattern as the federal rule, longer baseline.

California also matters for a second reason that has nothing to do with retention length. Since January 1, 2023, job applicants are covered by the CCPA as amended by the CPRA, because the temporary exemption for applicant and employee data expired rather than being renewed. Applicants in California can ask what you collected, ask for it to be corrected, and ask for deletion. A deletion request does not override a legal retention obligation, which means you can decline where a statute requires you to hold the record, but you have to answer, and answering requires knowing what you have.

Does Illinois require you to delete an AI video interview?

Yes, on request, within 30 days. This is the sharpest conflict in the whole area and most retention guidance ignores it. Under the Illinois Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act, an employer that used AI to analyze a video interview must, on the applicant's request, delete that interview within 30 days of receiving the request, and must instruct anyone else who received a copy to delete theirs too, including electronically generated backup copies. Those third parties are required to comply.

Set that against the federal rule requiring a year of retention and the tension is obvious. The practical reconciliation most employers reach: delete the video as asked, and keep the non-video record of the hiring decision, meaning the application, the questions asked, the scores and the reasoning. The Illinois duty is aimed at the video interview specifically, not at erasing every trace that someone applied. It is worth confirming that reading with counsel if you hire in Illinois at any volume, and worth confirming that your vendor can execute a real deletion including backups within the window.

Illinois obligations do not stop at deletion. The same act requires notice before the interview, an explanation of how the AI works and what it evaluates, and consent before the interview is analyzed. Those disclosure duties are separate from the recording consent question, which trips teams up constantly. We separate the two in interview recording consent laws and map the state picture in AI interview laws by state.

What about biometric data?

If any part of your screening creates a biometric identifier, a face template or a voiceprint, Illinois BIPA adds a requirement most retention policies miss. A private entity holding biometric identifiers must publish a written retention schedule and destroy the data when the purpose for collecting it is satisfied or within three years of the individual's last interaction, whichever comes first. The policy has to be public, and the entity must actually follow it.

The cleanest way to handle this is to not create biometric data in the first place. An interview that evaluates what a candidate said, scored against written criteria, does not need a face template, and several vendors have moved away from facial analysis for exactly this reason. Our platform does not perform facial analysis or create voiceprints, so BIPA's schedule is not triggered by the screen itself. If you are evaluating tools, ask each vendor directly whether they generate a biometric identifier, because the answer changes your compliance surface considerably. The wider set of duties is on our AI hiring compliance page, and the definitional question of what counts as an automated employment decision tool is in what is an AEDT.

How do you write a retention policy you can actually follow?

Pick one period per record type, write it down, tell candidates, and automate the deletion. An unenforced retention policy is worse than no policy, because it documents the standard you set and then proves you did not meet it. Most of the risk in this area comes from drift rather than from choosing the wrong number.

• Set the baseline at your longest applicable obligation, which for a multi-state employer usually means California's four years rather than the federal one
• Split the schedule: keep recordings for the shorter period, keep transcripts and scores for the longer one
• State the retention period in the consent notice the candidate agrees to, not only in an internal document
• Automate deletion on the schedule so it does not depend on a person remembering
• Build a hold procedure that suspends automatic deletion the moment a charge or claim arrives
• Confirm your vendor deletes backups, and get the answer in writing during procurement
• Have a documented route for a deletion or access request, including the Illinois 30 day video rule

One more habit worth adopting: review the schedule when you enter a new state. Retention is one of the few compliance areas where hiring one remote person can change your obligations, in the same way the New York City bias audit duty follows the job's location rather than your headquarters. If you are auditing what your screening actually records and scores, auditing your screening rubric for bias is a sensible companion exercise, because both questions are about being able to explain a decision later.

The short version for hiring teams

Keep applications and interview records for at least a year, two if you are a federal contractor over the thresholds, four if you hire in California. Preserve everything relevant the instant a charge is filed, and make sure your automatic deletion can be paused. Keep the transcript and the score longer than the video, because that is the part that answers questions. Honor an Illinois applicant's deletion request for an AI video interview within 30 days, backups included, while keeping the rest of the hiring record. Then follow the policy you wrote, because that is the part regulators and plaintiffs actually test.

If you want a first-round screen that produces one clean, scored, consented record per candidate instead of fragments in five systems, the AI interviewer runs it end to end, and you can try it on this page. Every advance decision stays with your recruiters.