I once applied for a job and received a slightly jarring letter saying they were going to delete their record of my application. But when I read it more carefully, it turned out to be referring to another application I had made years earlier for a completely different job at the same company. They did hire me for the new job, but certainly not because they'd rummaged through their piles of old CVs and decided to initiate contact with that one special snowflake who might somehow still be sitting next to the phone holding his breath for years.