If you were turned down for a job this year, three things you are allowed to ask, and the one date worth putting in your diary

If you have been rejected and you suspect nobody read it.

Ask the employer directly whether the decision was made solely by automated means, with no meaningful human involvement. Put it in writing and keep a copy. The question matters more than it looks, because the answer determines whether the rest of this applies.

If the answer is yes, or if they will not say.

Where a decision has legal or similarly significant effect and was made without meaningful human involvement, you are entitled to three things: to be given specific information about the decision, to make representations about it, and to ask for a person to review or contest it. Ask for all three by name. An employer that has not thought about this may need the terms spelling out.

If you want to see what they held on you.

A subject access request is free, and it covers the personal data an organisation processed about you, including in a recruitment process. It is a separate route from the three rights above and does not depend on the automated threshold being crossed.

If you are the one doing the hiring.

The regulator's finding was not that employers were concealing anything. It was that most believed they were not making automated decisions and a number of them were. Two checks are worth running. Does the person reviewing have the authority and the room to overrule the ranking. And is that review applied to every candidate at that stage, or only to the ones near the top.

The date.

The government consultation on workplace monitoring technologies closes on 30 September 2026. It covers surveillance, algorithmic management and AI-enabled decisions at work, and it is open to anyone, not only to employers and unions. If you have been through one of these processes from either side, that is the live route for saying so on the record.

One thing we cannot tell you.

Which employers the regulator wrote to. Sixteen organisations were contacted and have agreed to change their practices, and they are not named, because the underlying work was voluntary engagement rather than an investigation. If you were rejected by one of them this year, there is no way for you to find that out.