What Happens to Your Assessment Data, and What You Can Ask For

You spent forty minutes on an assessment, an algorithm turned it into a profile, someone made a decision, and you received four sentences of rejection. It is a reasonable moment to wonder what actually exists about you now, who has it and what you are entitled to see. In several jurisdictions the answer is more than candidates assume.

Who holds what

Almost every assessment involves at least two organisations, and confusing them is why requests get bounced between them.

The employer

The employer decides that an assessment will be used, chooses the vendor, configures which sections you sit, sets any cut score, and makes the hiring decision. In data protection terms they are usually the party deciding the purpose of the processing, which makes them the party your request should generally go to.

The vendor

The publisher delivers the test, scores it and generates a report. They typically process your data on the employer's instructions, and they normally also hold data for their own purposes, such as maintaining norm groups. Vendors usually redirect candidate requests to the employer, which is why going to the employer first saves a step.

Sometimes a third party

A recruitment agency, a recruitment process outsourcer, or an applicant tracking system. Where an agency assessed you, the agency is frequently the one holding the result and sharing it with several client employers, which is worth clarifying before you sit anything an agency sends you.

Your rights, by market

How long is it kept

Retention is set by the organisation rather than by any universal rule, and the honest answer is that it varies from months to years. What drives it in practice:

• Reuse windows. Employers who let a result stand for a subsequent application obviously retain it for at least that long. Twelve months is a common figure in graduate recruitment.
• Defensibility. Employers keep selection records to be able to justify decisions if challenged. This is a legitimate reason for retention beyond the hiring cycle.
• Norm maintenance. Vendors need data to keep norm groups current. This is usually aggregated or de-identified, which changes its status.
• Talent pools. If you agreed to be kept on file, you agreed to retention. Worth reading, because it is often a pre-ticked part of a long form.

The automated decision-making question

Candidates often assume a machine rejected them. Sometimes that is exactly what happened: a cut score applied automatically, with no human looking at the result below the line. Often it is not, and the assessment was one input into a human decision.

The distinction matters legally in the UK and EU, where solely automated decisions with significant effects attract additional requirements, including meaningful information about the logic involved and, in appropriate cases, human review. It also matters practically, because “was a human involved in the decision about my application?” is a specific, answerable question, and asking it politely sometimes produces a more considered reply than a general complaint would.

How to ask for your report, in practice

Most candidates never do this and most of the ones who do get something back. A workable approach:

1. Ask the recruiter informally first.“Would you be able to share the feedback report from the assessment?” Many publishers generate a candidate-facing version precisely for this, and a large share of employers will simply send it.
2. If that fails, make a formal request.In the UK and EU this is a subject access request, and it does not need to be on a form or use any magic words. Write to the employer's privacy or data protection contact, identify yourself and the role, and ask for the personal data held about you including the assessment results and reports.
3. Be specific about what you want. A request for everything produces a slow, broad response. A request for the assessment report and the scores associated with your application is easier to fulfil and comes back faster.
4. Ask the interpretive question too. Which norm group your results were compared against is the piece that makes a percentile meaningful, and it is a fair thing to ask alongside the data itself.

What to expect: a percentile or band per section rather than a raw score, because raw scores are discarded during scoring. Personality reports are usually narrative. You will not normally be given the item-level answer key, and that is a legitimate refusal: test security is a recognised exception in most regimes, because publishing keys would destroy the instrument for everyone.

Before you sit it: three questions worth asking

• Who receives the results? Especially relevant if an agency is running the assessment on behalf of clients you have not met.
• How long will they be kept and will they be reused? This determines whether a poor result follows you into your next application to the same organisation.
• Will I get feedback? Asking before you sit it is a much better position than asking after a rejection, and some employers commit to feedback as a matter of policy.

If you are also requesting an adjustment, the same conversation is the right place to ask where that information goes. The adjustments guide covers how those requests are usually routed.

Why this is worth the email

Setting rights aside, an assessment report is one of the few genuinely informative documents anyone will ever hand you about how you work. A percentile per ability domain and a narrative personality profile is more structured feedback than most people receive in a career. The worst outcome of asking is that nobody replies.