Assuming you are referring to Ontario’s Employment Standards Act, 2000 (ESA), there are a few different retention periods being blended together. The ESA does not establish a general rule that all former employee files must be retained for seven years. Most core ESA records—such as an employee’s name, address and employment start date—must be kept for three years after employment ends, while hours-of-work records generally must be kept for three years after the applicable day or week. Vacation time and vacation pay records have a longer five-year retention period. As of January 1, 2026, employers with 25 or more employees also have to retain copies of publicly advertised job postings and associated application forms for three years after the posting is removed, as well as prescribed information provided to interviewed applicants for three years.
The seven-year period you may have seen is more likely either an organization’s conservative HR retention practice or a rule applying to a particular type of record. For example, under Ontario’s Employment Protection for Foreign Nationals Act, certain records concerning foreign nationals must be retained for seven years. CRA records, including payroll-related financial records, generally have to be maintained for six years from the end of the tax year to which they relate. For that reason, organizations sometimes adopt a blanket “seven years after termination” personnel-file rule administratively, but that is not the general ESA minimum.

If the employee has died
I would not shorten the retention period because the employee has died. Death ends the employment relationship, so where an ESA rule runs from the date the employee “ceased to be employed,” that date would ordinarily become the starting point for the applicable retention period. In other words, if an employee dies while employed, retain records for the same statutory period you would following any other termination of employment. Records with their own retention trigger—such as vacation records, leave documentation, payroll/tax records, or litigation-related material—should continue to follow that particular rule. If there is an outstanding estate matter, insurance claim, WSIB claim, human-rights issue, lawsuit or other dispute, I would also place a legal hold on potentially relevant records rather than destroying them when the normal retention period expires.

Volunteers and recruitment records
Volunteers are different because the ESA generally regulates employees, so I would not automatically apply the new ESA job-posting retention requirement to a genuine unpaid volunteer recruitment campaign. However, I would recommend adopting a parallel volunteer recruitment process as an HR best practice. The Ontario Human Rights Commission takes the position that the Human Rights Code can apply to volunteers and other unpaid workers in a work-like relationship, including recruitment and selection. This means volunteer applications, interviews and screening should be handled using essentially the same non-discriminatory principles as employee recruitment.

A practical volunteer recruitment retention standard would be:
-keep the volunteer posting/role description, applications, interview notes, scoring or selection rationale and screening documentation for a consistent defined period, commonly 2–3 years;
-retain the successful volunteer’s relevant onboarding records for the duration of the volunteer relationship plus the organization’s chosen post-service retention period;
-collect only information genuinely needed for the volunteer role, especially where vulnerable-sector checks, driver’s licences or other screening is involved;
-keep medical, accommodation, criminal-record and other sensitive information separately and restrict access;
-use consistent interview questions and documented selection criteria tied to the essential functions of the volunteer role; and
-securely destroy information once the retention purpose has expired, unless litigation, an investigation, insurance requirements or another legal obligation requires it to be preserved.

The OHRC expressly cautions organizations against allowing Code-protected characteristics to influence decisions about volunteer opportunities and recognizes volunteers within its broad interpretation of employment protections.
For an Ontario organization, I would therefore build a retention schedule with separate categories rather than one blanket period: employee recruitment records – 3 years where the 2026 ESA provisions apply; statutory employee records – generally 3 years; vacation records – 5 years; payroll/tax records – at least 6 years as applicable; internal former-employee personnel files – whatever longer defensible period the organization adopts, often 7 years; and volunteer recruitment records – an internally established period such as 3 years. Death of an employee would not, by itself, change those periods.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.
-HRInsider Staff