The Rise of Video in Hiring and Human Resources
Video has become deeply embedded in the hiring process. What began as a pandemic-era necessity has evolved into a permanent feature of modern recruiting. Video interviews, whether live or asynchronous, are now standard practice for organizations of all sizes. LinkedIn reports that over 80 percent of companies use video at some stage of their hiring process. Beyond interviews themselves, HR departments record onboarding sessions, training materials, performance reviews, exit interviews, internal investigations, and compliance documentation.
This proliferation of HR video content creates an enormous repository of sensitive personal information. A single video interview captures a candidate's face, voice, mannerisms, and spoken words. It may reveal their approximate age, race, gender, disability status, accent, and other characteristics that are protected under employment law. The candidate shares personal information about their career history, skills, salary expectations, reasons for leaving previous employers, and professional goals. All of this data is embedded in the video file.
The volume is staggering. A mid-sized company hiring for 50 positions per year might conduct 500 video interviews, each generating a recording that needs to be stored, shared, reviewed, and eventually converted or archived. Larger organizations with continuous hiring cycles produce thousands of interview recordings annually. Each recording is a data liability that requires careful handling under privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and emerging state-level privacy laws.
When these recordings need to be converted, whether for compatibility with HR information systems, for sharing between team members on different platforms, for archival in specific formats, or for use in bias audits, the method of conversion matters immensely. Uploading candidate interview recordings to cloud-based conversion tools means sending deeply personal data to third-party servers, creating privacy risks that HR professionals cannot afford to take.
Candidate PII and the Legal Landscape
Interview recordings are a concentrated package of personally identifiable information. From a data protection perspective, a video interview recording is one of the highest-risk data types an organization handles. It contains biometric data in the form of the candidate's face and voice, which many jurisdictions classify as sensitive personal information requiring enhanced protection.
The General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union treats biometric data as a special category of personal data under Article 9. Processing biometric data requires explicit consent or another specific legal basis. If an EU-based candidate's interview recording is uploaded to a cloud conversion service, the organization has potentially transferred biometric data to a third-party processor without adequate legal basis. Under GDPR, fines for mishandling special category data can reach 20 million euros or 4 percent of global annual turnover, whichever is higher.
The California Consumer Privacy Act and its amendment, the CPRA, gives California residents the right to know what personal information is collected about them, the right to delete that information, and the right to opt out of its sale or sharing. When a recruiter uploads a candidate's interview recording to a cloud conversion service, they are sharing that personal information with a third party. The candidate may not have been informed of this sharing, and the conversion service may not be listed as a service provider in the organization's privacy policy.
Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act is particularly relevant because it requires explicit written consent before collecting or disseminating biometric identifiers, including face geometry data captured in video. Several other states have enacted or are considering similar biometric privacy laws. An HR department that routinely uploads interview recordings to cloud services may be violating these laws with every upload.
Beyond privacy regulations, employment discrimination laws add another layer of concern. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission oversees federal anti-discrimination laws that prohibit hiring decisions based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or genetic information. Interview recordings that are stored on or transmitted through third-party services could theoretically be accessed, breached, or subpoenaed, potentially exposing the organization to discrimination claims if the recordings reveal that protected characteristics influenced hiring decisions.
Bias Audit Recordings and Equal Opportunity Documentation
Organizations increasingly use video recordings as part of their efforts to ensure fair and equitable hiring practices. Bias audits, where trained reviewers watch interview recordings to identify patterns of bias in interviewer behavior, have become a component of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at many companies. These audits serve an important purpose, but the recordings used in them require especially careful handling.
Bias audit recordings are scrutinized specifically for evidence of how candidates with different characteristics are treated. The recordings are analyzed for differences in question types, interview duration, interviewer warmth, follow-up probing, and overall engagement across candidates of different backgrounds. By their nature, these recordings are explicitly linked to protected characteristics like race, gender, and age. They represent some of the most sensitive HR data an organization possesses.
If bias audit recordings are uploaded to a cloud conversion service for format standardization or compression, the organization has sent data explicitly linking individual candidates to protected characteristics to a third-party server. In the event of a data breach at the conversion service, the organization could face not only privacy law violations but also employment discrimination liability if the recordings are exposed.
New York City's Local Law 144, which regulates the use of automated employment decision tools, requires annual bias audits for organizations using AI in hiring. Similar legislation is being considered in other jurisdictions. As these requirements expand, more organizations will be conducting and documenting bias audits, increasing the volume of highly sensitive recordings that need to be processed.
ConvertFree provides a secure way to handle bias audit recordings. Whether you need to convert recordings to a standard format for review, compress them for archival, or extract audio for transcription analysis, the processing happens entirely in your browser. No candidate data, protected characteristics, or audit findings ever leave your device. This approach is consistent with the heightened duty of care that bias audit recordings demand.
Video Interview Platform Compatibility Challenges
The video interview technology landscape is fragmented. Organizations use a mix of platforms for different purposes: Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet for live interviews; HireVue, Spark Hire, and VidCruiter for asynchronous video interviews; and various proprietary platforms for specialized assessments. Each platform records in its own format with its own codec and container preferences.
Zoom recordings are typically saved as MP4 files with H.264 video and AAC audio. Microsoft Teams recordings are stored in MP4 format in OneDrive or SharePoint. Google Meet recordings go to Google Drive as MP4 files. So far, relatively compatible. But asynchronous video interview platforms often use different formats. Some record in WebM for browser efficiency. Others use proprietary containers. When candidates record on their own devices, the format depends on their phone or computer: iPhones produce MOV files, Android phones create MP4 files with varying codecs, and webcam recordings might be in any number of formats.
HR teams frequently need to consolidate these diverse recordings into a common format. This might be required for their applicant tracking system, which accepts only specific formats. It might be needed for long-term archival in a format that will remain accessible years from now. It might be necessary for sharing recordings with hiring managers who use different devices or software. It might be mandated by the organization's record retention policy.
The conversion need is real, but the privacy risk of cloud-based conversion is equally real. Every time an HR team member uploads a candidate recording to a cloud conversion tool, they are sending biometric data, personal information, and potentially protected characteristic data to a third party. Over the course of a year, a busy HR department might process hundreds or thousands of recordings through these services.
With ConvertFree, HR teams can standardize all interview recordings to their preferred format without any data leaving their devices. Whether converting MOV to MP4, WebM to MP4, or compressing large recordings for storage, the entire process happens locally in the browser. This eliminates the data processing concern while solving the practical format compatibility problem.
GDPR and CCPA Compliance for Recruitment Video
Compliance with privacy regulations is not optional for HR departments, and the consequences of non-compliance are increasingly severe. Both GDPR and CCPA impose specific obligations on organizations that collect and process personal data, and interview recordings fall squarely within the scope of both regulations.
Under GDPR, any processing of personal data must have a lawful basis. For interview recordings, this is typically either consent or legitimate interest. Critically, when data is shared with a third-party processor, the organization must have a data processing agreement in place, the processor must provide adequate security guarantees, and the data subject must generally be informed of the sharing. Most cloud-based conversion services are not set up to serve as GDPR-compliant data processors for HR content. They are consumer tools designed for convenience, not regulatory compliance.
GDPR's data minimization principle requires that personal data processing be limited to what is necessary for the stated purpose. If the purpose is file format conversion, uploading an entire interview recording to a cloud server processes far more data than necessary. The video content, the candidate's face, voice, and everything they said, is not needed for the conversion algorithm. Only the technical data stream needs processing. Browser-based conversion achieves the same result while minimizing data exposure to zero third parties, aligning perfectly with the data minimization principle.
Under CCPA, organizations must disclose the categories of personal information they collect and the categories of third parties with whom they share it. If HR routinely uploads interview recordings to cloud conversion services, those services should be disclosed as third-party recipients of personal information in the organization's privacy policy. Most organizations do not make this disclosure because they do not think of file conversion as data sharing, but technically, it is.
The right to deletion under both GDPR and CCPA also presents complications. If a candidate requests that their personal data be deleted, the organization must ensure that all copies are removed. If interview recordings have been uploaded to cloud conversion services, the organization may not be able to verify that the conversion service has deleted its copies, cached versions, or backup copies of the files.
By using ConvertFree for all interview recording conversions, HR departments eliminate these compliance complications entirely. No data is shared with third parties. No data processing agreements are needed for the conversion step. No disclosure of third-party sharing is required. Deletion requests can be fulfilled with certainty because the data never left the organization's own devices.
Practical Implementation for HR Teams
Implementing browser-based video conversion in an HR workflow is straightforward and can be done without involving IT departments or procurement processes. Here is how HR teams can integrate ConvertFree into their existing processes.
For interview recording standardization, establish a standard output format for your organization. MP4 with H.264 encoding at 720p resolution is an excellent choice for interview recordings because it produces manageable file sizes while maintaining sufficient quality for review purposes. When interview recordings arrive in various formats from different platforms, use ConvertFree to convert them to this standard format before importing them into your applicant tracking system or HR information system.
For bias audit preparation, convert all recordings to a consistent format and resolution before distributing them to reviewers. This ensures that technical quality differences between platforms do not inadvertently influence the audit. Convert the files in batch, one at a time through the browser, and organize the standardized files in your local audit folder.
For archival and retention, many organizations are required to retain interview recordings for a specific period, typically one to three years depending on jurisdiction and company policy. Convert recordings to a space-efficient format for long-term storage. MP4 with H.264 at moderate bitrates balances quality and file size well for archival purposes.
For sharing with hiring managers, convert recordings to formats that are universally playable on any device. MP4 is the safest choice. If you need to extract audio only for phone-screen recordings where video is unnecessary, convert the video to MP3 or WAV format. This reduces file sizes dramatically and removes the visual component, which can help reduce bias in review processes.
Create a brief standard operating procedure document for your HR team that specifies ConvertFree as the approved tool for all video and audio file conversions. Include the standard output settings and basic instructions. Because ConvertFree requires no installation or accounts, onboarding new team members is as simple as sharing the URL and the SOP document. The key message for training is clear: candidate recordings never leave your computer during the conversion process.