Guidelines

What we publish, and what we take out.

These rules exist to protect two groups: the people who tell us why they left, and the named individuals who cannot answer back.

Write about your own experience

The most useful stories describe what happened to you and how you decided. They do not need to be balanced, generous or well written. They do need to be yours.

This works: “I felt senior leadership communicated poorly during the reorganisation, and after the second round I stopped believing the plan.”

This does not: “John Smith committed fraud and lied to investors.” It names someone who cannot respond, and states as fact something we have no way to check.

We will not publish

• Anything identifying a private individual — names, contact details, or descriptions specific enough to single someone out
• Accusations of criminal conduct against identifiable people
• Threats, abuse, harassment or hate speech
• Confidential business information, trade secrets, customer data, or unreleased plans
• Contact details of any kind, including your own
• Spam, advertising, or anything unrelated to leaving a job
• Stories that are not about your own employment

Naming people

You can describe a role — “my manager”, “the CTO”, “the person who replaced me”. You cannot name them. We remove names when we find them, and the published story notes that something was removed.

This is not squeamishness. A named individual has no way to reply here, and an anonymous allegation against a named person is the one thing this format is worst at handling fairly.

Being honest about a dismissal

If you were fired or laid off, say so. We do not treat it as less credible, we do not ask you to justify it, and “I was never given a reason” is a recorded answer rather than a gap. Being dismissed is one of the most common ways a job ends and pretending otherwise would make the whole dataset wrong.

Editing and rejection

A person reads every written story. We may publish it as submitted, remove parts of it, or reject it. When we remove something, we never rewrite what remains — we only take things out, and the story says that we did.

Rejections cannot be appealed. Submissions are anonymous, so we have no way to contact you and no way to verify that a later message comes from the same person. If a story is rejected you are welcome to submit a different one that follows these rules.

If you think something here is wrong

Every published story has a Report link. Reports go to a person, not an algorithm. Use it if a story identifies someone, reveals confidential information, makes a serious accusation, or is simply untrue.

We cannot tell you the outcome of a report, because reports are anonymous too.

Reading these pages fairly

A company page shows the people who chose to tell us. That is not a survey, it is not a sample, and it does not become one because there are a lot of them. Treat it as several first-hand accounts and a count of what they said — which is genuinely useful, and less than proof.

See also how it works and our privacy notice.