Community guidelines
The conduct expected of everyone who takes part, and what happens when it is not met.
Last updated
This is a publication, not a forum — for now. There is no feed, no direct messaging and no public discussion. These guidelines cover contributing and responding, which is all that exists today. We would rather publish the rules early than discover we need them.
What is expected
- Write from your own experience. Not a summary of someone else’s, and not a composite.
- Protect the people in your story. HR work is made of other people’s difficult moments. They did not agree to be published.
- Disagree with the idea. The person is not the argument.
- No recruiting, selling or pitching through stories, responses or contributor profiles.
- Say when you are uncertain. Uncertainty stated plainly is more useful than false confidence.
How this is enforced
Proportionately, and by a person.
- A conversation. Most problems are a misjudged sentence, and an edit fixes them.
- Declining the piece, with the reason given.
- Unpublishing, where something published turns out to breach these guidelines — logged in corrections if readers were affected.
- Declining future submissions. Reserved for deliberate harm: exposing someone, or misrepresenting facts after being asked to correct them.
Appeals
Reply to the editor who made the decision, or email editors@hr.cafe. A different editor reviews it where one is available. We will tell you plainly if no one else is available — the publication is small, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.