The ICO gave employers a set date to stop turning jobseekers away by machine. It won't name them, or say if anyone checked

If you have applied for a job and heard nothing back after an online test, it is possible no person ever read what you wrote.

That is not a guess. It is what the Information Commissioner's Office found when it looked at how more than 30 employers use automated tools to hire. In its report Recruitment rewired, published on 31 March 2026, the regulator said most of those employers believed their tools only supported a human decision. The evidence said otherwise. It frequently saw signs that hiring managers were unlikely to look at the scores or answers of the candidates a tool had ranked low. The high scorers got a person. The low scorers got a click.

The report gives an example. A tool sorts applicants into red, amber and green. The manager has been trained to review everyone, but reads the greens properly, glances at the reds and rejects them. In the regulator's view, that is a solely automated decision in law.

The difference matters because the law treats the two differently. Where a decision about you is made with no meaningful human involvement, the employer has to tell you, and you are entitled to safeguards, including the right to challenge it and to ask for a person to look again. A candidate who never knows a machine decided cannot ask.

So what happened to the employers? The report's closing page says the ICO wrote to those it judged likely to be making these decisions, set out its findings, and gave them a set date to put things right. Sixteen confirmed they would act on its recommendations.

On 7 September we asked, under the Freedom of Information Act, for the names of the sixteen, and whether anyone had checked that the changes were made. The ICO replied on 5 October. It withheld the names, saying that publishing them would make organisations reluctant to work with it. It withheld what the employers told it under a separate law that bars its staff from disclosing it. On the second question it said only that the work has concluded.

That leaves the follow-up open. The ICO did not say it checked, and it did not say it did not. On 5 October we asked it to review its reply, and to tell us at least how many employers it wrote to, what date they were given, and how many have confirmed the changes were made rather than promised to make them. We will report what it says.

There is a fair case for the ICO's approach. Its report says the findings came from voluntary engagement, not an audit or an investigation, and employers who volunteer may stop if they expect to be named. That is the trade the regulator has chosen.

The cost of that trade falls on the applicant. The employers know who they are. The regulator knows. The people turned away by a score nobody read are the only ones in this who cannot find out.

We first wrote about this report on 25 August, under the headline "Asked whether machines were making their hiring decisions, most employers said it was unlikely. The regulator found several of them were." Having now read the report in full, that undersold it. The ICO's own summary says many employers using automated recruitment are likely making these decisions.

WHY IT MATTERS HERE

If you were turned down after an online test or a recorded video interview, you can ask the employer whether a person reviewed your application. If nobody did, you can ask for somebody to look again.