Greenhouse export candidate data: the decision records worth flagging and the data to leave out

What a Greenhouse account holds

Greenhouse is an applicant tracking system. In a mid-sized company it typically holds job requisitions, job descriptions, pipeline stages, interview plans, scorecards, offer approvals, sourcing channels and reports on time to hire.

Most of that sits in two layers. One layer is personal: candidates, their resumes, contact details and feedback about them. The other is structural: how a company defines a role, what it asks, how it scores and how the process moves. The second layer is what a partner can sensibly talk about.

Why the structural layer matters

AI developers building agents for knowledge work want records of how people make decisions through multiple steps. A well-run hiring process is one: a requisition is approved, a job description is written, interview kits define questions and scoring rubrics, interviewers submit scorecards, a debrief decides, an offer is approved or declined.

Only the company can decide which of these are in scope, and only after rights review.

Retention and export realities

Do not assume a clean export. Greenhouse offers an API and standard reporting, and an admin can usually extract data, but what is available depends on the plan, permissions and the company's configuration. Check the vendor documentation and the company's contract rather than rely on a partner's summary.

Questions for the head of people operations or IT:

• Is there an automatic candidate data deletion or anonymisation setting, and since when?
• Are job templates and interview kits stored only in Greenhouse, or also in shared documents?
• Who holds admin rights, and have they changed?
• Was data migrated when the company changed applicant tracking systems?
• Is there a reporting database or data warehouse copy?

Privacy and data-protection law on applicant data differs by state and by country. This page offers no legal view; the company should ask its own counsel.

The depth check in five questions

• How many years has the company used the system?
• Do job and interview templates date back more than a few years?
• Is a deletion policy in force, and what survived it?
• Are the structured elements (kits, rubrics) reusable and documented?
• Can a named person export non-personal material?

If most answers are positive, hiring becomes a useful supporting row in the company's inventory. If the answers show everything was purged, it adds little.

How to read the answers

Hiring is also where company culture shows. Teams that document how they interview tend to document how they do other work, so a clear answer here is a mild positive signal for the rest of the company. It is not proof of anything, and the inventory decides.

Pitfalls

Where hiring records sit in a wider picture

A hiring system makes more sense beside systems that hold work outcomes. Compare it with Workday HR processes, where identifiable worker records are also excluded, and with sales and operating histories such as legacy CRMs, trucking TMS data and insurance agency management systems. For a reminder of why keeping a copy before cancellation matters, see the Xero records guide.

What to say to a head of people operations

The data inventory builder helps list systems and years without describing content. Illustrative: a fictional 200-person engineering firm lists Greenhouse with six years of job templates and interview kits, notes that candidate data older than two years was purged under policy, and moves on to its engineering systems.

Next step

If a company you know hires at scale and runs structured processes, check the who qualifies baseline and register as a partner to make the introduction. Companies can apply at sourcex.si/apply. Partners earn 25% of eligible platform fees collected, capped at $100,000 per referred company, paid only after the buyer pays and SourceX receives its fee.