Where candidate resumes go in HireSalt

When you upload a resume to HireSalt, the file and its text are stored on Railway in the United States. The text is sent to third-party AI providers, which read it and return the scoring. Before that, we remove email addresses and phone numbers that our filter detects. We do not remove names, locations or profile links. You keep the original contact details; only the copy sent for scoring is filtered. The rest of this article follows one resume through that path, step by step, and says where the limits are.

One resume, step by step

1. Upload. A recruiter uploads a PDF or DOCX file. A candidate can also apply through a company’s HireSalt application page: they give an email address and a resume, may add a name, and must tick a consent box before the application is accepted.

2. Text extraction. HireSalt pulls the text out of the file. The original file and the extracted text are both stored in your account.

3. The filter. Before anything is sent for scoring, a filter looks for email addresses and phone numbers in the extracted text and replaces them. The originals stay on our servers and are put back into the candidate record afterwards, so you still see how to reach the person. The same filter runs before the career-story step and before the feature that drafts a job from a resume.

4. Third-party AI providers. The filtered text and the job description go to our primary AI provider. If that provider is unavailable, they go to a fallback AI provider instead. Resumes and job descriptions are not used to train AI models. Model training is turned off on the AI provider accounts HireSalt uses.

5. Score and notes. The reply comes back as category scores, short notes on each sub-criterion, and a candidate summary. Those are saved with the resume. If you add your own notes, they are saved too. How the scoring itself works is covered in how HireSalt scores a resume.

6. Storage. Everything above lives in one place, described next.

What is removed and what is not

The filter handles two kinds of detail.

• Email addresses are removed wherever the filter finds them.
• Phone numbers are removed too. The filter is set up for Indian formats, and it also catches international numbers written with a dialling code, such as +44.

No filter of this kind is perfect. A phone number written in an unusual way can get through, and we say so rather than promise otherwise.

Some things are not removed. Candidate names are sent to the AI provider. So are locations and profile links, because the scoring step reads them from the resume. If you need names kept out of the AI step entirely, HireSalt does not do that today.

Blind Screening is a separate setting. It hides candidate display names and uploaded file names from the Candidates tab while you review. It changes what you see on screen. It does not change what is sent to the AI provider.

Where it is stored, and for how long

The application, the database, uploaded files and the AI gateway are hosted on Railway in the United States. We have not published a fixed retention period for candidate records, so this article does not state one. We also make no promise here about database backups, because we have not published a backup schedule.

Deleting data

When a recruiter deletes their account, HireSalt deletes the jobs that recruiter owns, and with them the resumes, uploaded files, scores, notes, shared report links and candidate email logs. Files are queued for removal in the same step and removed once the deletion is committed; if a removal fails it stays queued and is retried.

Two things stop a deletion. A sole team owner cannot delete the account while the team exists. Active billing has to be cancelled first.

There is no self-serve tool for removing a single candidate on request. If someone asks you to remove one person’s data and you need our help, write to us using the contact details in the privacy policy.

Shared report links

A recruiter can create a link to a report so a hiring manager can read it without an account. Three facts matter here.

• Anyone with the link can open it. There is no sign-in. The report can show candidate names, scores and the AI’s reasoning. Treat the link like the report itself.
• The link stops working after 7 days. The link is long and random, and the page asks search engines not to index it.
• Expiry is not deletion. An expired link returns a not-found page, but the record behind it is removed with the rest of the account’s data on deletion.

If you do not pick a subset of candidates, a report covers the top 25 by score.

What a score is, and is not

A score is decision support. A person decides. We built HireSalt so that a recruiter reads the notes behind a number and chooses what to do.

There is one setting that changes this, so we will describe it exactly. Automatic rejection is off by default. It also sits behind a platform-level switch that stays off unless we enable it. When both are on, it acts on candidates the platform has tagged as skip, after a delay the recruiter sets. That tag comes from the score when automatic triage is on. A rejection email goes out only if the recruiter has chosen a template and the candidate has an email address. If you switch auto-reject on, a number can lead to a rejection without a person looking, and you should decide whether that fits your process and your obligations.

Beyond that, HireSalt sends a candidate an email only when a recruiter sends one, singly or in bulk. Each email goes out as HireSalt on behalf of the recruiter, with replies directed to the recruiter. We log the recipient, the subject, the first 200 characters of the body and whether it was sent. Applying through a company’s page does not trigger a confirmation email to the applicant.

What we do not claim

We are not certified or audited by a third party. We do not claim the scoring is free of bias, and we do not claim a bias audit; our reasons are in a separate article we will publish after legal review. We do not claim the scores predict who will be a good hire. We do not claim to detect fake resumes. And this article is a plain description of how data moves today, not a legal opinion on your obligations as an employer.

The full policy, and asking us

The privacy policy is at /privacy. It is the document to hand to a legal or IT reviewer, and it lists the service providers we use. If something here is unclear, or your reviewer needs an answer the policy does not give, write to us using the contact details in the policy. We would rather answer a hard question before you upload than after.