Why your performance review won't help you get your next job

Your management will pretend this doesn’t exist!

Deloitte's 2025 Human Capital Trends report found only 2% of CHROs think their performance management system works. 72% of workers and 61% of managers could not say they trust their organization's performance-management process. Even more interesting, 75% of organizations said they were not very or not at all effective at accurately evaluating the value created by individual workers.

A company can spend an entire year evaluating you, asking your manager to write feedback, assigning ratings, collecting peer reviews, calibrating everyone against each other, and eventually giving you a number or a label.

And then admit that it still doesn't really know how much value you created.

Visible work gets rated, valuable work gets missed

I've seen versions of this play out with senior technology leaders.

Someone spends two years leading a major platform migration. They reduce infrastructure costs, improve reliability, and help the business launch products faster, and then their performance review says something like "exceeds expectations."

That's it.

Another person spends the same two years doing work that is much easier to see. They run meetings, produce reports, close tickets, and hit a long list of quarterly objectives, and their review looks fantastic because the work is easy to document.

Hiring managers never see your review

The problem gets much bigger when these people eventually enter the job market.

A hiring manager doesn't have access to your internal performance review, and none of yall are getting hired if that was the case (just kidding =). They don't know how your company calibrated you against everyone else. They don't know whether "exceeds expectations" actually meant you were exceptional or whether half the organization received the same rating.

They have your resume and whatever you can explain in an interview.

That means you need to know how to translate your work into something another company can understand.

"I managed a team of 45 engineers" tells me something.

"I led a 45-person engineering organization responsible for rebuilding the payments platform, cutting processing costs by 18% and reducing production incidents by 30%" tells me much more.

The second person has made the business outcome visible.

Keep your own record of results

Deloitte's research argues that organizations need to move beyond performance-management processes and pay more attention to outcomes, manager relationships, organizational design, data and the actual flow of everyday work.

For Nodejs users, I’ll spell out the obvious:

Don't wait until your annual review to discover whether your career is progressing.

Keep track of the problems you solved and what changed because you were there.

Know the numbers. Know the scale. Know the business reason behind the project.

When you eventually leave, your performance review stays inside your old company.

Your results and your story come with you.

Having problems telling your story to hiring managers? We got you covered!