Hi Gemma

I think people hold onto recruitment documents long enough to see whether there is a request for feedback or an accusation of discrimination. Although there is a 3-month window to bring a claim from the date of the discrimination, a lot of people seem to scrap records at 6 months.

However, if you hold data on someone there is no limit to when someone can request to see it via a Data Subject Access Request and if the records reveal some form of discrimination, the person would probably be able to request an extension to the 3-month limit on the grounds that they had only just become aware of the information.

I can’t remember the names of the parties, but there was one case where the claimant was discriminated against in an internal application and found notes years later than demonstrated the bias when, ironically, he was eventually promoted and found the records of his previous application.

I know that isn’t exactly the question you asked, but it is a consideration when you are thinking about how long to keep data. It isn’t so much how long you are “allowed” to keep it, You need to approach this from the perspective of whether there is a real reason that justifies keeping it and what can happen as a result.