Teams meeting transcription for interviews: policies, storage and the 120-day default

Microsoft Teams transcribes a meeting when two conditions are both true: the meeting policy assigned to the organizer has transcription turned on, and the person who starts the recording or transcript also has that setting. Get either one wrong and an interviewer sees no transcript option at all, with no error message explaining why. Below is what Microsoft's own admin documentation says about that policy, where the finished transcript ends up, how long it lasts, and what a candidate is told — checked against learn.microsoft.com as of September 2026.

The setting that turns transcription on: meeting policy, not a personal toggle

Transcription in Teams is controlled by a meeting policy, not an individual user preference. Microsoft's guide to managing transcription and captions for Teams meetings describes a Transcription toggle inside Meeting policies in the Teams admin center, managed for the whole organization through the Global policy or assigned to specific users and groups through a custom policy. The same setting can be managed in PowerShell with the -AllowTranscription parameter on Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy. Microsoft's documentation states this setting is "On" by default for new policies — worth confirming with your IT admin rather than assuming, since an org can and does turn it off.

Separately, Microsoft's overview of recording and transcription policies notes that when policies are inconsistent across meeting types, calling and events for the same person, the experience is inconsistent too — a team assigned a custom meeting policy that turns off transcription can still have it on for 1:1 calls if nobody touched the calling policy. If interview transcripts are inconsistent across your recruiting team, mismatched policies across meeting, call and event types is the first thing to check.

Who can start a recording, and what a transcript needs beyond that

Per Microsoft's guide to managing Teams recording policies, Teams' meeting recording is controlled by the same kind of meeting-policy toggle (Meeting recording, or -AllowCloudRecording in PowerShell), and "both the organizer and recording initiator need to have recording permissions to record the meeting." Organizers with a Teams Premium license get finer control, and can limit who is allowed to record or transcribe a specific meeting through their own meeting options.

A transcript needs its own policy on top of that: recording without transcription turned on produces a video with no transcript file next to it, and no captions available on playback either, per Microsoft's transcription guide. If an interviewer tells you "the recording saved but there's no transcript," a transcription policy that is off for that user, while recording is on, is the most likely reason.

Live captions are a separate feature from transcription and easy to confuse with it: captions show real-time subtitles during the meeting itself, controlled by their own Live captions policy setting, but Microsoft's documentation is explicit that Teams "doesn't save captions." If an interviewer only turned on live captions during the call and never started recording with transcription enabled, there is nothing left to review afterward — captions disappear with the meeting, and only a saved transcript, tied to a recording, persists for a scorecard or a submittal written later.

Where the recording and transcript land

Microsoft's article on Teams meeting recording and transcript storage states that for ordinary scheduled meetings, "the recording saves to the organizer's OneDrive... even if the organizer didn't attend the meeting," in a Recordings folder, and the transcript is stored together with it. Channel meetings are the exception: their recordings and transcripts go to the channel's SharePoint site instead, in a Recordings folder under that channel's document library.

Two consequences matter for a hiring team specifically:

• The organizer's OneDrive is the system of record. If a hiring manager schedules the interview, the transcript lives in their OneDrive, not the recruiter's or the ATS — so whoever needs it for a scorecard or submittal has to either be shared in on the file or pull it themselves before that access changes (for example, when the hiring manager leaves the company).
• External participants need to be added explicitly. Microsoft's documentation says invitees automatically get a shared link to the recording, "except for external participants," whom the organizer has to add to the sharing list by hand. An outside interview panelist or a client contact on an agency call will not see the file unless someone remembers this step.

If a recording can't upload to OneDrive at all — no license, or a full storage quota — Microsoft's documentation says the file goes to temporary async storage and is deleted after 21 days if nobody downloads it, with no further retry.

The 120-day default, and how to change it

Meeting recordings and their transcripts expire after 120 days by default. Microsoft's admin documentation on managing this describes a Recordings and transcriptions automatically expire setting under Meeting policies in the Teams admin center; when it is on, admins set a Default expiration time in days, anywhere from 1 to 99,999, or set it to never expire using the value -1 in PowerShell. A1-licensed users have a lower ceiling: 30 days maximum by default. One limitation worth knowing before you rely on this: changing the setting only affects recordings and transcripts created after the change — it cannot retroactively extend or shorten the clock on interviews you already recorded.

Separately, Microsoft Purview retention label policies can also delete a recording and its transcript together, with a stated minimum retention period of one day once such a policy applies. If your organization uses Purview for compliance retention across Microsoft 365, that policy — not the 120-day meeting-policy default — may be what actually governs how long interview transcripts survive.

What a candidate is told, and where consent fits

Microsoft's Teams admin documentation describes an Explicit recording consent policy setting (-ExplicitRecordingConsent in PowerShell) that, when turned on, requires meeting participants to actively agree to be recorded or transcribed before continuing in the meeting. Where that policy is off, participants still see a notification when recording or transcription starts, but are not required to respond to stay in the meeting. Which behavior your candidates experience depends entirely on how your organization's meeting policy is configured — it is not a fixed, one-size-fits-all Teams behavior, so it is worth confirming with IT rather than describing it to candidates from memory.

A notification inside the meeting is not a substitute for telling the candidate beforehand, in the invitation, that the interview will be transcribed. For wording you can use before the call, see our interview recording consent script, and for how recording law varies by state, see the consent guide. Microsoft also lets admins replace the default Teams recording and transcription privacy statement with a link to the organization's own policy, through the Privacy and Security URL setting in meeting invitations — worth checking if you want candidates linked to your own consent page instead of Microsoft's default text.

Admin controls worth reviewing before a hiring push

A recruiting team that runs interviews mostly through one-on-one scheduled meetings should focus on the first three rows. A team running panel loops through a Teams channel should also check the fourth and fifth, since channel meeting permissions inherit from the channel's SharePoint site rather than following the individual interviewer.

It is worth asking IT one more question while you have their attention: whether your tenant has a Microsoft Purview retention label policy that applies to meeting recordings. If it does, that policy can delete a transcript on its own schedule regardless of what the 120-day meeting-policy default says, and it takes precedence in practice even though it lives in a completely different part of the admin center. A recruiter who only checked the Teams admin center's meeting policies could reasonably believe interviews last 120 days when a Purview policy elsewhere is actually removing them sooner, or keeping them far longer for legal hold reasons.

If you would rather capture the interview yourself

Everything above assumes the recording and transcript live inside Teams and Microsoft 365, subject to whatever your organization's admin has configured. Some interviewers prefer to keep that data off shared cloud storage entirely by capturing the call's audio on their own computer instead. Interview Signal works this way on Teams calls: it runs locally while the interview happens, and the transcript, scorecard and submittal stay on that computer rather than in OneDrive or SharePoint. That is a different trade-off, not a substitute for knowing what Teams itself does with a transcript if your organization keeps using Teams' built-in recording for some interviews.

Before your next Teams interview

Ask your Teams admin three specific questions rather than assuming an answer: is transcription on in the Global meeting policy or a custom one assigned to your team, what is the current default expiration value for recordings and transcripts, and is explicit recording consent turned on. Those three answers describe your actual candidate data lifecycle far more accurately than "Teams keeps recordings for a while" ever will.