Recording job interviews in Australia: state surveillance law and the Privacy Act

Australia has no single national rule for recording a job interview. Whether you need every participant's consent or only your own depends on which state or territory the candidate is in when the call happens, because surveillance and listening devices law is set separately by each jurisdiction. A second, separate layer, the Privacy Act 1988, governs what you may then do with the recording, and it applies more broadly to a job applicant than most recruiters expect, because the exemption that covers existing employee records does not reach candidates.

Two separate legal questions, not one

"Is it legal to record this interview" is really two questions in Australia. The first is whether the state or territory's surveillance or listening devices Act lets you use a recording device on this conversation at all, which is answered state by state below. The second, answered later in this page, is what the Privacy Act 1988 requires once a recording exists: telling the candidate you are collecting their information, using it only for a stated purpose, storing it securely, and eventually dealing with it appropriately. Both questions have to be answered; passing the first does not answer the second.

State and territory consent rules for recording a conversation

Several widely shared summaries of Australian recording law state the rule backwards for at least two states, usually because a listening devices Act reads similarly to an outsider surveilling someone else's conversation and to a participant recording their own, and it is easy to cite the wrong subsection. The table below reflects the specific subsection covering a person who is themselves a party to the conversation, which is the situation a recruiter is in.

Five of the eight jurisdictions, New South Wales, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT, need every principal party's consent even though the recruiter is on the call. Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory let a participant record their own conversation without asking. Because a recruiting process rarely stays inside one state, the practical rule for a national team is to ask every candidate for consent every time, the same conclusion recruiters reach for US two-party consent states.

The "lawful interests" exception, and what it means for note-taking

In each of the five all-party states above, the Act also allows a single principal party to record without everyone's agreement if the recording is "reasonably necessary for the protection of the lawful interests" of that party, or if it is not made for the purpose of communicating or publishing the conversation to people who were not part of it. This exception was written mainly with disputes and personal safety in mind, and we found no Australian case specifically applying it to a recruiter recording a job interview for note-taking accuracy. Some employment lawyers argue that creating an accurate internal record of a hiring decision is a lawful interest in this sense; others treat the exception as narrower than that. Given the uncertainty, the safer and simpler approach in an all-party state is still to ask and get a clear yes, rather than rely on an untested exception.

Does a video interview count the same as a phone call

Each Act regulates a "private conversation," a concept that predates video conferencing and generally turns on whether the parties' circumstances indicate they wanted the conversation confined to themselves, not on the specific medium carrying it. A Zoom, Teams or Google Meet interview's audio fits the same definition a phone call does under this reading. Some of the state Acts separately regulate "optical surveillance devices," relevant to recording video rather than only audio, but that is a distinct provision from the listening-device sections in the table above; if your process also stores video, not just a transcript or audio, check the optical surveillance provisions in the candidate's state as a separate question.

The Privacy Act layer: job applicants are not "employee records"

Once a recording or transcript exists, the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles it sets out govern how you collect, use, store and eventually deal with it, for any organisation the Act covers. A common misunderstanding is that the Act's "employee records" exemption removes this obligation for HR data generally. The OAIC's guidance is specific that the exemption applies only to the records of a person who is a current or former employee of the organisation holding the record; a job applicant is not yet an employee, so their interview recording is not exempt. In practice, that means:

• APP 5 requires telling the candidate, at or before collection, that you are collecting the recording, why, and how it will be used, per the OAIC's Chapter 5 guidance.
• APP 3 limits collection to what is reasonably necessary for the recruitment purpose.
• APP 6 limits using the recording for anything beyond that stated purpose without a further basis.
• Once the person is hired, records tied to that pre-employment process generally move under the employee records exemption; records for an unsuccessful candidate do not, and stay subject to the Act.

Who is actually covered by the Privacy Act

Not every employer is an "APP entity" bound by these obligations in the first place. The OAIC's small business guidance states that most businesses and not-for-profits with an annual turnover of $3 million or less are not covered by the Act, unless an exception applies, such as being a health service provider or an organisation that trades in personal information for a benefit or service. As of September 2026, that general exemption has not been repealed; a narrower set of sectors, including accounting, legal, conveyancing, real estate and high-value goods dealing, lost the exemption from July 1, 2026 regardless of turnover, and further reform to the exemption has been flagged but not enacted. A small independent recruiting agency should check its own status against the OAIC's guidance rather than assume either way, since the answer changes what APP 5 through APP 11 actually require of it.

A consent script and notice checklist for Australian interviews

1. Default to asking every candidate, in every state, rather than trying to track which of the eight jurisdictions requires it. The three states that do not strictly require it still benefit from the practice.
2. Say it plainly at the start of the call: that you intend to record, why (accuracy of the interview notes), and that a written or audio record will be kept.
3. Get an audible yes before recording begins, not an assumption from silence.
4. If the candidate is a covered organisation's applicant, not yet an employee, give the APP 5 notice: what is collected, why, how it is stored, and how long it is kept.
5. Keep the recording only as long as the stated purpose requires, and have a deletion practice for candidates who are not hired.
6. Check the optical surveillance provisions separately if your process stores video, not just audio or a transcript.
7. Re-check your agency's Privacy Act coverage yearly, given the small business exemption is under active reform.

For the US federal and state picture, see is it legal to record a job interview. For a similar state-by-state or provincial breakdown elsewhere, see recording job interviews in Canada and recording interviews under UK GDPR. A ready consent line is in the interview recording consent script.