How the record works.
Every entry records the same things. The facts make it countable. The cost is what the count is for.
Desperation reads as a red flag, and the people hiring can see your profile. The honest version of your situation is the exact version that hurts you most to post, so it never gets counted.
Post it on LinkedIn and it gets clicks, but it also puts a question in the mind of every recruiter who sees it: why is this person still looking after six months? Friends and family get pieces of it, never the whole story, and holding the rest alone is overwhelming. There is nowhere to be fully honest about this without it costing you.
Here there is. Nothing you write is shown until a person has removed anything that could identify you, and none of it can be traced back to you.
The answers you pick from a list count immediately. They are fixed options — a department, a range of months — so there is nothing in them that could name you, and that is what lets the numbers be current rather than curated.
Anything you write in your own words is treated differently. A person reads it and removes anything that could identify you before a word of it is shown, and if we want to feature it, you see the final text and approve it first. That happens by hand, so it takes a little time. If you give us a way to reach you, it is stored apart from your story, never joined to it.
When enough people have answered, the numbers show what everyone feels and no one can prove: that doing everything right stopped being enough. That is the thing a headline cannot wave off.
Self-reported, unverified, self-selected. Every claim shows the number it rests on. We compare people within the record to each other; we never state what share of all workers this represents. It is testimony at scale, not a poll.