If you've applied for a job through PlainHire

The employer uses PlainHire to help review applications. This page explains what happens to your application, who decides, and your rights.

Who is responsible

The employer is the controller of your data: it decides how your application is handled. PlainHire processes your data only on the employer's behalf and instructions. To contact them, reply to any email you received about your application.

How your application is assessed

1. Your CV, cover letter and application email are read as text.
2. Details that aren't relevant to the job are removed first: your name, age and date of birth, sex and gendered words, marital and family status, nationality, religion, ethnicity, health, and photos.
3. A decision model checks the remaining text against each of the role's written, job-related criteria (for example “has managed a team of 10 or more”). It's a kind of AI, but not a chatbot: it doesn't write, summarise or form opinions. It answers the same fixed questions for every applicant and points to the lines it relied on, and to anything it couldn't find.
4. This produces an order in which the hiring team reviews applications. It does not decide anything.
5. A member of the hiring team reviews the evidence and decides whether your application progresses. If you're not taken forward, the reason given is based on the same criteria.

No decision about you is made solely by automated means. The software can miss things, especially if your CV describes something in an unusual way, which is one reason a person always reviews.

What data is used, and why

• Used: what you send (CV, cover letter, email), your contact details, and the team's notes and decisions about your application.
• Why: to consider your application for the role, at your request, and in the employer's legitimate interest in recruiting fairly and efficiently.
• Also: a separate language model reads your contact details from your CV, and helps draft emails to you. A person reviews every email before it is sent.
• Not used: photographs, and sensitive information about you. Your data is not used to train any model.

Who else handles it

PlainHire and its service providers: hosting and storage (Supabase, Render), email (Postmark), and the models that read applications and draft emails (TypeSafe's Jev and Anthropic's Claude, via OpenRouter). Some are in the United States, where transfers are protected by the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.

How long it's kept

Your CV, emails, notes and assessment are deleted a set time after the hiring process closes (90 days unless the employer chose otherwise). After that, only anonymous totals remain (such as how many people applied), plus anonymous records of how assessments compared with decisions. These contain no text from your application and nothing that identifies you.

Your rights

• An explanation of a decision about your application, including the criteria and the evidence that was found.
• A human review: ask for a person to reconsider a decision, give your point of view, and contest it.
• To object to your application being assessed by the decision model, and have a person assess it instead.
• A copy of your data, and to have it corrected or deleted.
• To complain to your data protection authority.

To use any of these rights, write to the address you applied to (or reply to any email about your application). You'll get a response within one month.