Almost every hiring team now runs on software, and most of that software is American. For a lot of tooling that's a non-issue. Candidate screening is different: a video interview is a person's face, voice, full name and work history in a single file, collected from someone who trusts you with it because they want a job. It's about as personal as personal information gets — and where it's stored is a question your candidates, your executive and your auditors are increasingly asking.
This is general information, not legal advice — but here's the landscape and the questions worth asking any vendor, including us.
The short version of your obligations
The Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles govern how organisations handle personal information. Two pieces matter most for screening:
APP 8 (cross-border disclosure). When you disclose personal information to an overseas recipient, you generally remain accountable for what they do with it. Using a US-hosted screening platform doesn't transfer your responsibility — it extends it to infrastructure you can't see, under a legal system your candidates didn't choose.
APP 11 (security and retention). You must take reasonable steps to protect personal information and to destroy or de-identify it when no longer needed. Screening recordings of rejected candidates sitting in a foreign data centre for years is exactly the pattern this principle exists to prevent.
None of this makes offshore platforms illegal. It makes them a compliance question you have to own and answer — in vendor reviews, client due-diligence questionnaires, and the uncomfortable email after a breach notification.
The questions to ask any screening vendor
Where exactly is candidate data stored, and is it replicated to other regions? What is the retention period, and is deletion automatic or manual? Are recordings used to train AI models? Who can access recordings on the vendor side? What happens to data when your account closes? A vendor with good answers will give them in writing without friction. A vendor with vague answers has answered anyway.
Why we built RecruitScreen onshore
RecruitScreen stores candidate recordings, transcripts and personal information in Sydney — not "primarily", not "by request on enterprise plans" — as the default and only behaviour. Video assembly and transcript generation run transiently on secure infrastructure in Singapore before results are written back to Australia; candidate content is never stored at rest outside Australia, and we say so plainly rather than leaving you to find it in a subprocessor list. Recordings are deleted automatically 30 days after a candidate is archived and 12 months after a campaign's end date, and you can permanently delete candidate data at any time. Recordings are never used to train AI models. Billing is in AUD on an Australian ABN, which means your privacy posture and your procurement paperwork agree with each other.
This is more than compliance hygiene: being able to answer "where is candidate data stored, and where is it processed?" precisely is the kind of detail that shortens a procurement review. The full picture is on the why Australian page, and you can see how the comparisons stack up against Willo, Hireflix and others.
Start a free trial — and ask us the vendor questions above; we like answering them.