Recording Job Interviews: Is It Legal and Do You Need Consent?

Employers can record job interviews, but consent is what makes it lawful, and the rule that applies is usually the candidate's, not yours. Federal law permits recording when one party to the conversation consents. Roughly a dozen states go further and require every party to consent, and because a remote candidate brings their own state's rule into the call, a company in a one-party state can still be bound by a stricter one. The practical answer for any employer hiring across state lines is to get clear, affirmative consent from every candidate, every time, and keep proof of it.

This question comes up the moment a hiring team considers recorded screening, whether that is a one-way video tool, a recorded phone screen, or an AI interview. It is also the question most vendor pages skip, because the honest answer involves saying that the law varies and that the buyer carries the obligation.

What follows is a plain description of how consent works for interview recording in the United States, where the state rules diverge, and how this is different from the AI disclosure laws that get confused with it. It is general information for hiring teams, not legal advice, and a multi-state hiring program is worth twenty minutes of your employment counsel's time.

Can employers record job interviews?

Yes. There is no general prohibition on recording a job interview in the United States, and employers do it routinely for legitimate reasons: letting a hiring manager review answers they were not present for, keeping a consistent record when several people screen the same role, and reducing the note-taking that pulls a recruiter's attention out of the conversation.

The constraint is not whether you may record, it is whether the people on the call agreed. Recording statutes are wiretapping and eavesdropping laws, and they turn on consent rather than on purpose. A perfectly well-intentioned recruiter recording an interview to be fair to a candidate is in exactly the same legal position as anyone else recording a conversation without permission.

Two smaller points are worth knowing. The federal business use exception, which lets employers monitor calls on equipment furnished in the ordinary course of business, is narrower than it sounds and does not override a state's stricter consent statute. And consent obligations run in both directions: candidates recording their own interviews are subject to the same rules, which is why a policy that only addresses what the employer does is incomplete.

Is it legal to record a job interview without telling the candidate?

In most of the country it is technically lawful, because federal law and the majority of states require only one party to consent, and the recruiter on the call is that party. In roughly a dozen states it is not lawful, and the penalties are not trivial: all-party consent statutes generally carry criminal exposure plus a private right of action.

Even where it is permitted, secret recording of candidates is a bad idea for reasons that have nothing to do with statutes. It reads badly if it surfaces later, it undercuts the trust you are trying to build with someone you want to hire, and it makes the recording far less useful, because a candidate who did not know they were recorded has a much stronger argument about how the recording is used. Disclosure costs you nothing and removes the entire problem.

Which states require all-party consent to record?

Published lists differ, which is itself the useful thing to know. The states most consistently identified as requiring all-party consent for at least some categories of recording are California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington. Oregon is the common asterisk: it applies an all-party rule to in-person conversations while treating telephone calls differently.

Treat any list you find, including this one, as a starting point rather than an authority. Several states sit in genuinely unsettled territory, some rules distinguish phone calls from in-person conversations, and video adds a further wrinkle because image and audio are sometimes governed separately. The reason this matters less than it appears is covered in the next section.

Does the candidate's state or the employer's state control?

Assume the stricter of the two applies, and design for that. When a recruiter in Texas records a candidate sitting in California, two states have a claim to the conversation, and the safe reading is that California's all-party rule reaches it. Courts have not produced a tidy nationwide answer, and the practical consequence is that you cannot resolve this by looking up your own headquarters.

This mirrors something that surprises employers about AI interview laws by state: the New York City bias audit rule follows the job's location rather than the company's, so a fully remote employer with no New York office can still owe the audit. Recording consent behaves the same way. The obligation travels with the candidate.

Which is why the multi-state answer is the simple one. Rather than maintaining a matrix of which applicants trigger which statute, ask every candidate for explicit consent regardless of where they are. It costs one sentence and a click, it is defensible everywhere, and it means a change in any one state's law does not quietly put you out of compliance. Teams that already track obligations across jurisdictions tend to fold interview recording into the same register of compliance obligations they use for everything else, which is a reasonable habit if your hiring spans many states.

What should an interview recording consent notice say?

Short, specific, and before the recording starts. A notice that appears after the fact, or that is buried in a privacy policy nobody opens, is weak evidence that anyone agreed to anything. The useful test is whether a candidate could describe, from what you showed them, what was captured and what happens to it.

• That the interview will be recorded, stated plainly, before recording begins
• What is captured: audio only, audio and video, or a transcript
• Why you are recording it, in one sentence, such as review by the hiring team
• Who inside the company can see it
• How long you keep it, and how a candidate can ask about their data
• An affirmative action to agree, rather than a pre-ticked box or silence

Keep proof. Store the timestamp and the version of the notice the candidate actually saw, because a consent record that cannot show what was agreed to, and when, does not do much work if it is ever questioned. If your process is automated, this should be captured by the system rather than left to a recruiter to remember.

How is recording consent different from AI disclosure laws?

They are separate obligations that often apply at the same time, and conflating them is the most common mistake we see. Recording consent comes from wiretapping statutes and asks whether everyone agreed to be recorded. AI disclosure comes from employment law and asks whether candidates were told that automated tools are being used to evaluate them.

Illinois makes the distinction concrete. Its Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act requires employers using AI analysis of video interviews to notify candidates, explain how the AI works and what it evaluates, and obtain consent before the interview. That is on top of Illinois being an all-party consent state for recording. Two duties, two sources of law, both live in the same interview.

New York City Local Law 144 adds a third layer for tools that meet the automated employment decision tool definition: an independent bias audit within the prior twelve months, a published summary of the results, and ten business days of notice to candidates. None of that is satisfied by a recording consent checkbox, and a recording consent checkbox is not satisfied by an AI notice. We keep the full picture of what US employers owe on our AI hiring compliance page.

How long should you keep interview recordings?

Long enough to meet federal record-keeping expectations for employment records, and no longer than your stated policy says. EEOC regulations require employers to preserve records made in connection with a hiring decision, and if a discrimination charge is filed, the obligation to preserve relevant records continues until the matter is resolved. Deleting a recording early because a retention clock expired, while a claim is open, is a serious problem.

Beyond that floor, shorter is better. Interview recordings are sensitive personal data about people who mostly did not get the job, and every additional month you hold them is additional exposure with declining value. Pick a period, write it into the consent notice, and actually enforce it, because an unenforced retention policy is worse than none: it documents what you said you would do while proving you did not.

What about one-way video interviews and AI screening?

Every rule above applies, and one-way video tools make the consent step easier rather than harder, because there is no live call to interrupt. The candidate is already at a screen, so the notice and the affirmative agreement fit naturally before the first question. The same is true of an AI screen, where the interview does not begin until the candidate has read the disclosure and agreed.

Voice screening is where teams most often get caught out, because a phone call feels informal in a way a video tool does not. It is not treated differently. A recorded AI phone screen is a recorded call, and the all-party consent states apply to it exactly as they would to a recruiter with a recording app. We build the disclosure and consent step into the flow on our AI phone screening and voice AI interview pages for that reason.

One last point specific to AI screening: consent to be recorded is not consent to be scored. If a system evaluates answers and produces a rating that influences who advances, candidates should be told that separately, in the language the applicable AI disclosure law expects. We describe exactly what our scoring does and does not measure in how AI interview scoring works, and every advance decision on our platform stays with a human reviewer.

The short version for hiring teams

Record if it helps you hire better, and it usually does. Tell every candidate before you start, in plain language, and get an affirmative click rather than assumed agreement. Do not try to run a state-by-state matrix for a remote pipeline, because the strictest rule is cheap to follow and the matrix is expensive to maintain. Treat AI disclosure as a separate duty that happens to land in the same conversation. Then keep the recordings only as long as you said you would.

If you want to see what a consented, disclosed, rubric-scored first-round screen looks like end to end, the AI interviewer runs it with the consent step built in, and you can try it on this page.