Is AI interviewing legal for aged care and NDIS hiring in Australia?

The Aged Care Act 2024 (Cth). Commenced 1 November 2025. It carries the provider obligations around a suitable, screened workforce. Nothing in it prohibits automated screening tools. What it does mean is that if you use one, your worker screening obligations do not move to the vendor. They stay with you.

The Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles. A recorded video interview is personal information, and often sensitive information. You need consent, a stated purpose, a retention period, and a lawful basis for any overseas storage. If your vendor stores candidate video outside Australia, that is a cross-border disclosure and APP 8 applies to it.

Automated decision-making transparency. Under the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024, from 10 December 2026 organisations must disclose in their privacy policy where automated decision-making is used in decisions that significantly affect a person's rights or interests. Recruitment scoring sits squarely in that. The OAIC has been consulting on guidance for this. If you are running AI screening now, your privacy policy will need to say so before that date.

Anti-discrimination law. The Age Discrimination Act, Disability Discrimination Act, Racial Discrimination Act and Sex Discrimination Act all apply to a hiring process regardless of whether a human or a model produced the score. A tool that infers age, disability, accent or ethnicity and lets that influence an outcome creates liability for the employer, not the vendor. The Australian Human Rights Commission has published on exactly this risk.

Mandatory worker checks. NDIS Worker Screening Check, AHPRA registration, National Police Check, Working with Children Check, and the qualifications your role requires. These are verification obligations. An AI interview can ask about them and record the answer. It cannot verify them, and no vendor should tell you otherwise.

Human decision, always. Ployo runs the first-round interview and returns a ranked shortlist with a met, partially met or not met verdict against each of your must-have requirements. Your recruiters review candidates and make every hiring decision. The product does not auto-reject.

Evidence, not a black box. Every requirement verdict is backed by the candidate's own words, quoted from the transcript, timestamped against the recording. If you need to explain a decision, the explanation is already there.

No inferred attributes. Age, accent, appearance, disability and health status are prohibited as decision criteria. This is written into our data governance documentation, not just implied.

Australian data residency, contractually. For Australian customers we run in AWS Sydney, ap-southeast-2, and commit to it in the agreement, with no offshore transfer without your written consent. This is a per-agreement commitment, so confirm it is in your contract rather than assuming it.

We do not train on your data. For customers on that clause, candidate data is not used to train, improve, test or develop AI models without written consent.

Defined retention. A rolling retention window with automated deletion, configurable, plus a documented deletion protocol with a deletion register, role-based access controls and periodic access review. On termination, data export and deletion within 30 days with written certification.

Compliance items are structured questions. Ployo asks about NDIS Worker Screening, AHPRA registration, police checks, Working with Children Checks, right to work and certifications as mandatory structured questions, and records the answers as auditable evidence.