Terms of use

1. About these terms

These terms of use are an agreement between you and To be published before launch, the company that runs BeforeJob (“BeforeJob”, “we”, “us” or “our”). They apply to the BeforeJob website, the installable app and any other way we offer the service.

By signing in, contributing or simply browsing BeforeJob, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use BeforeJob. Our privacy policy and community guidelines are part of these terms, so please read them too.

We publish these rules as the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (the “IT Rules”) require. We will remind you of them, and of our privacy policy, at least once a year.

2. What BeforeJob is

BeforeJob is a place where people who work or have worked at a company share what it is like: reviews, salaries, interview experiences, layoff and appraisal reports, and discussions. Job seekers and employees use these contributions to make better decisions. Employers can reply and listen.

BeforeJob is an intermediary under section 2(1)(w) of the Information Technology Act, 2000. We host what users post. We do not write, commission or edit contributions, and we do not endorse them. A contribution is the opinion of the verified employee who wrote it, not the opinion of BeforeJob. We follow the due diligence the IT Rules ask of intermediaries, which is what lets us host your honest experiences under section 79 of the Act.

3. Who can use BeforeJob

To use BeforeJob you must:

• be at least 18 years old and able to enter a contract under the Indian Contract Act, 1872;
• sign in with a mobile number that belongs to you;
• have only one personal account, and not use someone else’s account;
• not have been suspended or banned from BeforeJob before.

You are responsible for what happens under your account. Keep your sign-in codes to yourself. We will never ask you for a code over a call, email or chat. If you think someone else has used your account, tell us through the grievance page.

4. Verification and anonymity

Before you can write a review, salary, layoff report or appraisal report about a company, you verify that you work or worked there. You can use your work email, your EPF passbook, or a payslip or offer letter. Interview experiences do not need employment verification, because candidates are not employees. They are marked as coming from an interview candidate. How verification works explains each method.

You promise that what you give us for verification is genuine and yours. Uploading a forged, edited or borrowed document is a serious offence under Indian law. We will reject it, close the account, and may report it where the law requires.

How we keep you anonymous

• Contribution records never hold your name, phone number or account id. They carry a pseudonymous key instead.
• Each contribution shows only a badge, such as “Verified current employee, 1 to 3 years”, and a month and year.
• Reviews and salaries go live after a random delay of 1 to 7 days, so the timing does not point to you.
• We never show a breakdown, such as a department or a city, with fewer than 5 contributions behind it.
• Employers never see who wrote anything. Our moderators see the contribution and its badge, never the account behind it.

Anonymity has limits we cannot control. If you describe something only you could know, people may guess who you are. Our guidelines have tips to avoid this.

Like every company in India, we must follow valid orders from courts and authorised government agencies. If we receive such an order, we will check that it is lawful and share only what it requires and what we actually hold.

5. Your contributions

When you contribute, you promise that:

• it is about your own experience, and is honest to the best of your knowledge;
• you worked at the company (or interviewed there, for interview experiences);
• it follows our community guidelines and contains none of the prohibited content listed below;
• it does not name or identify private individuals such as colleagues, managers or HR staff;
• it does not share information you are legally bound to keep confidential, such as trade secrets, unreleased financial results or client data.

Sharing your own salary, your opinion of your workplace and the facts of what happened to you is generally lawful in India. You are still responsible for what you write, so stick to what you know and say when something is your opinion.

We never rewrite your words. If our screening finds a problem, we show you what was flagged and why, and you decide how to edit it. We may remove a contribution, but we do not change what it says.

6. Prohibited content

Rule 3(1)(b) of the IT Rules lists information that no user may host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, store, update or share on an intermediary. On BeforeJob, you must not post anything that:

1. belongs to another person and that you have no right to share;
2. is obscene, pornographic or paedophilic; invades another person’s privacy, including bodily privacy; insults or harasses anyone on the basis of gender; is racially or ethnically objectionable; relates to or encourages money laundering or gambling; or promotes enmity between groups on the grounds of religion or caste with the intent to incite violence;
3. is harmful to children;
4. infringes a patent, trademark, copyright or other proprietary right;
5. deceives or misleads anyone about where a message came from, or knowingly and intentionally spreads information that is patently false, untrue or misleading;
6. impersonates another person;
7. threatens the unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign states or public order; incites any cognisable offence; prevents the investigation of any offence; or insults another nation;
8. contains a virus or any other code, file or program designed to interrupt, destroy or limit the working of any computer resource;
9. is an online game that is not a permitted online game under Indian law, or advertises or promotes one;
10. breaks any law in force in India.

Defamation is also an offence under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and a civil wrong. Do not state accusations of crimes or misconduct as fact unless you can back them up. The guidelines show how to describe a bad experience without crossing this line.

7. Using BeforeJob fairly

You must not:

• try to find out who wrote a contribution, or help anyone else do so;
• contact, pressure or retaliate against someone because you think they wrote a contribution;
• post fake contributions, or contributions about a company where you never worked;
• offer or accept money, gifts or favours for writing, changing or removing a contribution;
• create more than one personal account, or share your account;
• scrape, copy or download BeforeJob content in bulk, or use bots, without our written permission;
• probe, test or break our security, or get around our limits, verification or anonymity protections;
• use BeforeJob to send spam, advertising or unsolicited messages.

8. Licence to host your contributions

You keep ownership of what you write. To run BeforeJob, you give us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, display, format and distribute your contributions on BeforeJob and in search results or previews of BeforeJob pages. We may pass this licence on only to a company that takes over BeforeJob.

You also let us use contributions in aggregated, anonymous form: average ratings, salary ranges, trends and rankings. This includes analytics we offer to employers on paid plans. Aggregates never reveal who wrote anything, and never include a breakdown of fewer than 5 people.

The licence ends for a contribution when it is removed from BeforeJob, except for aggregates already calculated and copies we must keep by law. Because contributions are stored without a link to your account, a contribution you have not removed stays on BeforeJob after you delete your account. You can remove any of your contributions yourself in My contributions, or all of them when you delete your account. The privacy policy explains how.

9. Screening, publishing and moderation

Every contribution is screened before it goes live, by automated checks and, where needed, by a person. Screening looks for personal names, contact details, identifying details, threats, hate, confidential information and accusations stated as fact. Depending on the result we publish the contribution after its random delay, ask you to edit the flagged parts, hold it for a moderator, or decline it. Discussion posts and comments go live straight away once they pass screening, because they are conversations.

We are not required to monitor everything on BeforeJob, and we cannot check whether every statement is true. We verify that the author worked at the company. We act on reports, employer disputes, grievances and lawful orders as described below, and we may remove content or restrict an account that breaks these terms or the law.

10. Employer accounts

A company can claim its BeforeJob page through an employer account. Employer accounts are opened by people who verify an email address on the company’s domain, and we approve each one. Employers agree to these terms as well as any plan terms we agree with them.

Employers can:

• reply publicly to reviews on their page;
• dispute a contribution they believe breaks our guidelines or the law, which we review like any other report;
• manage their company profile, photos and job posts;
• run anonymous pulse surveys and see aggregated analytics, depending on their plan.

Employers cannot:

• remove, hide, edit or reorder contributions, or change ratings;
• find out who wrote a contribution, or ask employees whether they wrote one;
• offer rewards for reviews, or ask employees to post only positive ones;
• retaliate against anyone for contributing.

We may suspend or close an employer account that breaks these rules.

11. No pay-to-remove

We do not accept money, advertising, gifts or favours to remove, hide, move, edit or rank a contribution or a rating. Paid employer plans buy tools such as analytics, job posts and surveys. They never change moderation decisions, ratings or the order in which contributions appear. Every company’s ratings are calculated the same way.

If anyone offers such a deal, or claims to be able to arrange one in our name, please tell the Grievance Officer through the grievance page.

12. Reports, takedowns and grievances

Anyone can report a contribution with the report option on it. For formal complaints, including legal notices, privacy requests and court or government orders, use the grievance page. Our Grievance Officer handles them on these timelines, as Rule 3(2) of the IT Rules requires:

• every grievance is acknowledged within 24 hours and resolved within 15 days;
• requests to remove content that invades privacy or impersonates someone are acted on within 72 hours;
• content showing a person’s private parts, nudity or sexual acts, or a morphed image of a person, is removed within 24 hours of the complaint;
• orders from a court, or notices from an authorised government agency, are actioned within 36 hours.

We keep removed content and its records for at least 180 days, as Rule 3(1)(g) of the IT Rules requires for investigations. If you disagree with the Grievance Officer’s decision, you can appeal to the Grievance Appellate Committee set up by the Government of India within 30 days, at gac.gov.in.

13. Suspension and termination

You can stop using BeforeJob at any time and delete your account from your settings.

We may remove content, suspend contribution rights, or suspend or close an account if you break these terms, our guidelines or the law, if you misuse verification, or if we must do so under a court or government order. Where we can, and where the law allows, we will tell you what we did and why. If you think we got it wrong, raise a grievance.

The parts of these terms on the licence to host contributions, our name and software, disclaimers, limitation of liability, your responsibility for claims, and governing law continue to apply after your account is closed.

14. Our name and software

The BeforeJob name, logo, design, software and the way we organise and present information belong to us or our licensors. You may share links to BeforeJob pages and quote short parts of contributions with a link back. You may not copy our design or software, or reuse our content in bulk, without written permission.

15. Disclaimers

Contributions are personal opinions and experiences. We verify that their authors worked at the company, but we do not check every statement and we do not guarantee that any contribution is accurate, complete or current. Salary figures are self-reported and are a guide, not an offer or a promise.

Nothing on BeforeJob is legal, financial or career advice. Job posts and links to other websites are provided by employers or third parties and are their responsibility.

We work hard to keep BeforeJob running and safe, but we provide it “as is” and “as available”. To the extent the law allows, we make no promise that it will always be available, error free or suitable for a particular purpose.

16. Limitation of liability

To the extent Indian law allows:

• we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, opportunity, data or reputation;
• we are not liable for what users or employers post, or for decisions you make based on it;
• our total liability to you for any claim about BeforeJob is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or ₹1,000 if you have not paid us anything.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, such as liability for fraud, or any right you have under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019.

17. Your responsibility for claims

If someone makes a claim against us because of something you posted, or because you broke these terms or the law, you agree to cover our reasonable costs and losses from that claim. This does not apply where the claim arises from our own fault.

18. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of India. Before going to court, please raise the issue with our Grievance Officer so we can try to resolve it.

Subject to your right to approach a consumer commission under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, the courts at the city we name here (To be published before launch) have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from these terms or your use of BeforeJob.

19. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as BeforeJob or the law changes. The date at the top shows the latest version. If a change significantly affects your rights, we will tell you on BeforeJob, and by WhatsApp or email if you have turned those on, before it takes effect. If you keep using BeforeJob after a change takes effect, the new terms apply. If you do not agree, you can delete your account.

20. Contact

For questions about these terms, or to send a legal notice, use the grievance page. It reaches our Grievance Officer and gives you a ticket number you can track.