How Long Your Assessment Results Last, and Who Else Sees Them

A rejection email tells you nothing about what happens to the score behind it. Does it sit in a file for a year? Does it follow you to the next application? If you apply to a second company using the same test, do you sit it again, and does anyone there already know how you did? The answers exist, but they are scattered across employer policy, vendor platform design and data protection law, and almost none of them live where a candidate would look.

Almost nobody publishes a validity period

The question sounds like it should have a vendor answer. For most commercial providers it does not, and the reason is structural: the vendor is not the party that decides. The employer chooses the assessment, configures which sections you sit, sets any cut score, owns the result and decides how long it stands. The vendor delivers and scores the test. Validity windows therefore live in employer policy or in the contract between the two, and are rarely written anywhere you can read them.

Worth saying plainly, because the internet is full of confident figures. Six months, twelve months, two years: each is a real policy somewhere and none is a general rule. Anyone stating a provider's validity period without pointing at that provider's own documentation is reporting one employer's configuration as a property of the test.

Where a published number does exist

There is a pattern to the exceptions. Published windows appear when one organisation owns both the exam and the hiring decision, sits enough candidates to need a rule, and wants people to be able to plan a reapplication. Public safety entrance exams are the clearest case, and in Australia several state the window outright.

Notice what these share. One body runs the exam, the result belongs to a process rather than a vacancy, and passing buys something durable. Where an assessment is a component bought in by hundreds of unrelated employers, no equivalent statement is possible, because there is no single policy to state.

Score banking, and the platform that does it in the open

Some assessments are stored at the provider level rather than only for the employer who invited you, and pymetrics is unusually explicit about it. Its support centre states that candidates may play the games once every 330 days, that if you completed the required games within that window you will not be required to replay, and that at the point of login your existing gameplay data will be re-assessed against the new role profile you applied to.

That one policy contains three separate facts.

The third point is why a rejection from a game-based assessment tells you almost nothing about your performance. You were measured once and compared many times. It is the same logic that makes game-based assessments hard to prepare for conventionally: no pass mark, only a fit calculation that changes per role.

Two employers, one vendor: what actually travels

The default is that nothing does. SHL's candidate help centre states the mechanism plainly: your employer, or potential employer, is the controller of your personal data, and SHL's contracts with clients prevent it from giving you your assessment results without specific permission from that client. A vendor that will not release your result to you without the client's say-so is certainly not releasing it to a different client.

So in the ordinary case you sit the test again for the second employer and the two results live in unconnected places. This is why “I already did that test last month” almost never excuses you from doing it again, and it is the reassuring half of the answer: a bad morning at one company does not automatically become a permanent record at the next.

Three situations break that default, and all are worth spotting in advance.

• Platforms designed for reuse. Where the provider banks results against your account rather than an application, reuse is the product, not an exception.
• One recruiter, several clients. If an agency or recruitment process outsourcer sent the assessment, the organisation holding your result is the agency, and sharing it with client employers may be precisely the point. This is the case most worth clarifying in advance, because you may be consenting to a result shown to companies you have never spoken to.
• Groups and shared recruitment systems. Several legal entities on one applicant tracking system can behave as a single employer for score reuse, even where they present themselves publicly as separate brands.

Reuse inside a single employer

This is the common case and it genuinely varies. What is being decided is a configuration and a policy rather than a psychometric fact, so there is no number to look up and no honest way to invent one. Some employers re-test everyone every time. Some let a result stand for a defined period across any role. Some let it stand only within the same role family.

Two things do generalise.

• A reused score is reused as it was. Nobody re-norms it, re-weights it or adjusts it for the new role. It is lifted across intact, which is worth remembering if the second role is materially different from the first.
• Reuse is symmetric. A window that lets a strong result stand also lets a weak one stand. Candidates think of reuse as a convenience; it is equally a constraint. Whether you can clear it by sitting the test again differs by provider, and the retake rules guide goes through who allows what.

Retention: a principle, not a period

Data protection law is where candidates expect to find the number, and it is the one place that deliberately refuses to give one. The UK Information Commissioner's recruitment guidance rests on storage limitation: you must not keep information longer than you need it, and organisations set and document their own retention periods rather than follow a statutory timetable. For unsuccessful candidates it points at the statutory period during which a claim arising from the recruitment process could be brought, the usual justification for holding selection records past the decision.

The part connecting retention to reuse is the talent pool. The ICO's position is that an organisation may keep your information for new vacancies where it has previously informed candidates it will do so and explained the purpose. The tick box you skipped on the application form is therefore often the exact mechanism by which your result outlives the application it was collected for, and it is the one retention question you can settle yourself, by reading it.

Other markets rhyme rather than match. The EU applies the same storage limitation principle. Australia's Privacy Principles require personal information to be destroyed or de-identified once it is no longer needed. The US has no federal equivalent and varies by state. For what you can request and how, the companion post on what happens to your assessment data covers the rights side properly.

Who else sees the result

Fewer people than candidates fear, and in less detail. What circulates is usually a band or percentile per section rather than your answers, read by the recruiter and hiring manager, stored in the applicant tracking system, held by the vendor as a processor, and on senior or public sector processes interpreted by an occupational psychologist. Agencies are the wildcard. Reading the band itself is really a question about norm groups.

One reuse-specific wrinkle is worth knowing. The ICO's recruitment guidance states that organisations must not shortlist using solely automated decision making and profiling unless they can rely on an exception and have safeguards in place, and its own worked example is a machine-marked aptitude test with candidates ranked automatically. A stored score applied automatically to a second vacancy is a second automated decision, not a continuation of the first, which makes “did a human review this?” a fair question on a reused result as well as a fresh one.

Four questions that get you a real answer

Recruiters usually know all of these, because each determines whether they have to send another invitation. Ask before you sit the assessment, when they read as planning. After a rejection the same questions read as a complaint and get a more defensive reply.

• Will this result be used for any role other than the one I applied for?
• If I apply again, will I re-sit, or will you use this result? For how long?
• Who receives the result besides you? Essential when an agency or an outsourced recruiter sent the invitation.
• How long is it kept, and am I being added to a talent pool?

If you are also requesting an adjustment, the same conversation is where to ask where that information goes and whether it travels with a reused score. The adjustments guide covers how those requests are routed.

What to do with all of this

The conclusion is unglamorous. Where reuse windows run from months to years, and where a platform may re-score the same data against every role you apply for, the assessment you sit today is frequently the one that counts for the next application too. Treat the first attempt as the real one: rested, in a single uninterrupted block, on a device you trust, with the format already familiar. The week-before plan is built for exactly that, and it is cheaper than discovering afterwards that your one run for the year was the one where the wifi dropped.