Frequently asked questions
Every answer here restates something already published in our methodology, Terms of Service or Privacy Policy. Nothing on this page is a new promise — it is the same commitments in plainer language, with the source noted under each answer.
Submitting a report
What happens to what you submit, and what cannot happen to it.
Do I need an account to submit a report?
No. Reports never require an account and never will — submitting while not signed in is the default path, not a workaround. If you do create a free account it is pseudonymous: you choose a display handle rather than your real name, and using real or identifying information as a handle is actively discouraged. Posting in the community forum requires an account; submitting a report does not.
Source: Privacy Policy §2A
Will the company find out who reported them?
No. Submitter identity is never published, sold, shared, or disclosed to the companies being reported on, to third parties, or to the public — including in response to a company dispute request. If you submit while signed in, ownership is recorded as a salted one-way hash that cannot be reversed, and the mapping between that hash and any report is stored AES-256-GCM encrypted in a table with no public read access.
Source: Privacy Policy §2 and §2A
Is the exact salary or offer amount I enter published?
No. Offer figures are stored and displayed only as $20,000-wide bands. The exact amount you enter is never persisted at all, so there is no record of it to publish, leak, or subpoena.
Source: Privacy Policy §2A
How long do you keep my IP address?
Server logs and technical metadata such as IP addresses are automatically purged within 48 hours. That metadata is kept solely for fraud prevention, integrity monitoring and platform security, and is never shared with companies, displayed publicly, or used for advertising.
Source: Privacy Policy §2 and §8
Do you use my report to train AI models?
Submitted content is processed by automated systems on this platform — algorithmic scoring, inauthentic-activity detection, and the Ghost Score and Process Score calculations. It is not used to train third-party commercial AI models and is not shared with external AI providers for training purposes.
Source: Privacy Policy §5
How scores work
What the numbers are built from and when they are shown at all.
What makes a report "verified"?
A report is verified — also called email-confirmed — when the person who submitted it clicks a one-time confirmation link sent to the email address they gave. That is the entire bar. A corporate email domain, a LinkedIn match, or proof of employment is deliberately not required, because most candidates reporting a bad hiring experience no longer have access to that company’s systems and should not have to prove anything to the company they are reporting on. What email confirmation does prove is that a real, reachable person submitted the report.
Source: Methodology, "What counts as a verified report"
Why does this company have no score?
Scores are not displayed publicly until a company has at least five email-confirmed reports. Below that the page shows an insufficient-data message rather than an early number that could mislead. This is also a privacy measure: with a five-report floor, no published company score can be traced back to any single report.
Source: Methodology, "Thresholds and confidence"; Privacy Policy §2A
Does a confirmed report count more than an unconfirmed one?
Yes. An email-confirmed report carries five times the weight of an unconfirmed one in every score it feeds.
Source: Methodology, "Our data sources"
What do "Early data", "Medium confidence" and "High confidence" mean?
They describe how settled a score is. A company with 5 to 9 email-confirmed reports is labelled Early data — the score is real but may shift meaningfully as more arrive. 10 to 24 is Medium confidence. 25 or more is High confidence, meaning the score has stabilised.
Source: Methodology, "Thresholds and confidence"
What does the Ghost Score measure?
It is the percentage of a company’s weighted reports whose outcome was "no response" — the candidate applied or interviewed and never heard back at all, with no rejection and no offer. A Ghost Score of 20 means roughly a fifth of reported applications ended in silence. It is built entirely from what candidates report happened to them, and is a separate measure from a job posting being flagged "Likely Ghost", which comes from posting behaviour rather than candidate reports. The two can and do disagree.
Source: Methodology, "What the Ghost Score measures"
Where does the data come from?
Three sources. Confirmed candidate reports are the primary input. Public job posting data pulled from applicant tracking system APIs — Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday and others — feeds ghost posting detection and repost tracking. State WARN Act layoff filings across 35 states provide the layoff data.
Source: Methodology, "Our data sources"
Is the scoring formula public?
Yes, in full. The actual thresholds, weights and arithmetic are published on the methodology page rather than summarised. The one thing not published is any individual candidate’s raw answers, which stay aggregated to protect anonymity — but the rules for turning many answers into one score are all there.
Source: Methodology, "This is not a black box"
What these scores are not
The limits, stated plainly rather than buried in the Terms.
Are these scores statements of fact?
No, and this matters. All scores and ratings are opinions derived from user-submitted data and algorithmic processing — they are not statements of objective fact. The Hiring Index makes no claims or promises about the quality, completeness, accuracy or reliability of any score, rating, ranking or report, and companies should not treat a score as a legal assessment of their employment law compliance.
Source: Terms of Service §6
Can I use this to screen job applicants or make hiring decisions?
No. The Hiring Index is not a Consumer Reporting Agency under the FCRA, and platform data may not be used for employment screening decisions. Using it for any purpose covered by the FCRA — employment, credit, insurance or housing eligibility — violates the Terms and is undertaken entirely at your own risk and liability.
Source: Terms of Service; FCRA notice in the site footer
Who writes the reports? Does The Hiring Index write them?
Candidates do. The Hiring Index is the operator of an interactive computer service, not the author of any individual report. Every report reflects the opinion and experience of the person who submitted it, not the views of the platform or its operators.
Source: Terms of Service §1
What can a company do if it believes a report is false?
A company that believes a report contains a false statement of verifiable fact — as opposed to a negative opinion — can start a formal dispute through the dispute process. Disputes are reviewed in good faith, but there is no obligation to remove content that is protected opinion, and content is not removed on the strength of a legal threat or demand letter alone.
Source: Terms of Service §7
Something missing, or an answer that no longer matches what the site does? That is a bug worth reporting — read the full methodology and tell us what does not line up.