Reviews - Content Guidelines

Handshake Reviews—Student Guidelines

Handshake is committed to maintaining a safe, constructive forum for students to share honest reviews of real internship experiences. These guidelines help us foster a professional and supportive community of students helping students find and succeed at internship opportunities. A few things you should know:

• You can choose to have your name and profile picture published when you post a review, or choose to hide your name and picture. In both cases, you should expect for students at your school, students at other schools, and your employer to see your review. If you choose not to make your review visible, Handshake and your University will still know who posted the review.  

• We moderate reviews to ensure they follow the Handshake review guidelines below. We do not endorse or otherwise take responsibility for anything you say here. You are legally responsible for anything you post in a Handshake review.  Universities, employers and other students will have the opportunity to flag content they believe violates the review guidelines.

• If you write a review containing allegations of sexual assault, sexual harassment, criminal activity, or any conduct which threatens the safety or wellbeing of anyone, we will refer the matter to your university career service.

Please keep these rules in mind when writing reviews:

1. Respect Privacy: Do not post personal information

• Posting personal information on any forum can create a privacy risk. We will reject reviews which contain full names, phone numbers, email addresses or home addresses. (It’s ok to use the names of corporate leadership, we talk about that more below.)
• We will also reject reviews which indirectly but clearly identify a specific individual in a negative context.

2. Be Constructive: Do not post reviews that are unhelpful or unrelated to your internship

• Reviews are meant to help students learn more about the internship, and whether the internship will be a good fit. We will reject reviews which only contain information unrelated to the internship, the corporate culture, the student’s experience at the company, or the community the office is located in.
• We will also reject reviews of a company the student did not work for, or multiple reviews of the same experience. Reviews must be intelligible.
• We will not reject reviews for being too short, leaving questions blank, or containing spelling errors.

3. Be Honest, but Don’t Get Personal.  Do not post negative comments about people.

• We encourage you to share your honest review. However, we do not accept reviews that criticize specific people.
• We will accept critical reviews of the company’s leadership—the owner, founder, president, vice president, executive director, etc.—as long as it’s helpful to understanding the company culture or internship experience.

4. Be Professional.  Do not post profane, vulgar, discriminatory, hurtful or illegal content

• We will reject reviews which contain any profanities, swear words, or inappropriate sexual comments.
• We do not approve reviews containing negative comments about a person or group based on gender, race, national origin, or sexual orientation unrelated to the company culture or internship experience.
• It’s ok to post reviews containing comments about race, gender, national origin, or sexual orientation related to the company culture, the internship experience, or the community the office is located in. We will not reject reviews for comments about the dominant language spoken in the office.
• We will approve reviews that contain self-identifying information about race, gender, national origin, or sexual orientation.

5. Respect Confidentiality:  Do not post any others’ intellectual property or confidential information

• We will reject reviews which contain non-public information on upcoming products or services, non-public information about the company, non-public Research & Development activities, and budgets or detailed financial information.
• We will also reject reviews naming any of the employer’s customers or clients.

• We will reject reviews which contain trade secret or copyright-protected content authored by another person.

• We approve reviews that comment on intern compensation, or references to public or published negative press about a company.

6. Stay on Topic: Do not post spam or reviews unrelated to the internship

• We will reject reviews containing advertisements or promoting a product or service, including reviews of the company’s products or services and not the internship or company culture.
• We will also reject comments with links to products, services, or other companies, even if related to the internship, or links to other job listings or other job listing services.