How to write a good SELF REVIEW with EXAMPLES
Hi there, it's Laura!
Today I want to take some time to discuss how to write a good self review. This can be used as part of your yearly self review process, which a lot of companies have. You can also use this advice if you are preparing for a promotion and your company asks you to write a self assessment as part of the process.
If you’re even thinking about skipping your self review STOP RIGHT THERE, you’re about to make a grave mistake: self reviews are great at countering any bias or missing information your manager might have.
A well written self review is a power tool, that can ultimately save your career!
The BEST Self Review Structure
First, let’s talk about the sections that every good self review needs. We’re going to use a banana split analogy to better explain this. You have a delicious chocolate drizzle, 3 scoops of ice-cream that are in my opinion the best part and obviously a banana which holds everything up. Similarly your review will have 3 sections.
1.1 The Company Values: The Chocolate Drizzle
The chocolate drizzle on top of your self review is an explanation of how you display the company values. Every company has values that their promote and it’s very important that you include just how well you live by these values in your review. Is it pretentious? Perhaps.
I'm pretty sure that some of you think that you’re above this corporate speak and your work will speak for itself. I’m here to burst the proverbial bubble: your work does not speak for itself, you have to speak for yourself and the self review is exactly where you need to do it. Your work alone is not enough nowadays because more are more often, no one wants to work with a brilliant but unpleasant coworker. So open that document where all the values of your company are detailed (PDF, webpage etc) and highlight at least 1-2 examples where you demonstrate each of them. It's quite useful to pick up some keywords from the values page and use them while describing your examples.
It might take some thinking, it might take some wordsmithing but you need to do it. If you don’t want to dedicate an entire section to this, then you need to sprinkle the values into the next action, wherever you exhibit them. But please try not to skip the corporate values!
1.2 Current Achievements: Three Scoops of Ice Cream
The three scoops of ice cream in your review is composed of what you achieved during this assessment period. It’s the proverbial meat on the bone. Here you want to highlight your greatest achievements. To make sure that you have a good highlight of your work, do this:
List all of the projects that you worked on and what you delivered on them. Here you have to be specific and provide examples. If you can describe your achievements in STAR format
Then you will back up all your examples with metrics that can prove your impact. This is a crucial bit of your self review since if you provide the data, no one can dispute your impact. Here’s two examples so you can understand the real impact. Let's look at an example to see why it's important to have data. Which one do you think sounds better? “I handled all my customer requests and ensured customer satisfaction” OR “I answered all customer requests within 1h and the customer satisfaction for my interactions is 94% (up from 89% last year)”. Which one do you think is best to include? Of course the one with metrics is definitely better. Whatever metric will help you prove you had an impact, put it in and feel proud about it.
TIP: If you don’t remember everything you worked on go through your calendar and see if the meetings you had jog your memory
If you need any inspiration about how to describe your impact, check out this cheat sheet from Amazon’s promotion document, published by Fact of the Day 1:
If you had any goals or OKRs for to achieve, this is also where you will compare how did against these goals. You might be stressing over this especially if you didn't meet the goals but here’s what you want to doin that situation: challenge the goal! Was the goal too aggressive? Did it have some underlying assumptions that proved to be untrue? Did the priorities change mid year and that prevented you from achieving your goal? Whatever the reason make sure you document that in your self review so it may never be used against you.
This is also where you’re going to tie in feedback from your peers to your performance. Definitely make sure that you highlight all the things they say went well BUT this is also an opportunity to either dispel or give nuance to any negative comments that you might have gotten. If you think that those comments are unfounded then go out of your way to include some metrics that prove the contrary. If you think the feedback is fair, on the other hand, add them as thighs you want to work on in the next assessment period.
For example you can say something “Despite the fact that I aim to be transparent and keep everyone informed, it has come to my attention that not all my stakeholders believe that this is true. In the following quarter I want to improve on this by setting up a regular newsletter to everyone involved in the project.” Of course, you will have to follow up on these improvements that you set up for yourself but whatever you do, do not leave negative feedback unaddressed in your review
This is also the section where you highlight any improvements from critical feedback you might have received in your past review, or any improvement opportunities you were told to work on.
For example “In my last review I was told I need to improve my presentation skills. Over the course of this year I have taken public speaking class and took over presenting my team updates. Feedback from stakeholders has been great. ”
1.3 Your Past Achievements: The Banana
The banana might not be the star of the split show (IMO) but it’s holding up everything above it. The banana is all of your past experience that contributed to how well you did in this assessment period. This is especially important if you’re using this for the promotion process. The reason why you want to include this is to demonstrate growth, showcase that you’ve been working on improving your skills for a while, you’re not just gunning for a good review or a promotion but you’ve been constantly working on your skills. There is a solid foundation to everything that you’re doing so your good performance here is not a fluke! Unlike in the first section don’t go into exhaustive detail. You’re looking at a 5-7 sentences highlighting your main achievements that happened before the period of your current assessment.
2. Make the Most of Style
You want your self review to read like an action movie! There is action, there is adventure, helicopters flying over and Bruce Willis fighting bad guys! You want people reading your self review to think you’re the most badass co-worker they’ve never met! And that’s the thing, your self review will be read by people that don’t know you or don't know you very well! Most large companies have what is called "calibration meetings" where all the candidates at the same level are evaluated against the bar and against each other to see how everyone performs. I’m not going to go into legalities of this, upsides, downsides, you should assume that some form of comparative evaluation is going to happen and your self review is your chance to advocate for yourself.
2.1 Avoid Banal Words
The underlying theme of this entire section is “words are powerful” so to kick things off: Avoid using the number one generic verb which is "to do". There's nothing wrong with it but there are much better alternatives. Do you think a sentence such as “I did my task.” is exciting? I don’t think so. So why not enhance your contribution with some more nuanced verbs. Start your sentences with “”I handled” “I delivered” “I organised” “I created”. These give a strong statement as to what you achieved right off the bat! For example, by the nature of the language, “you handled” a difficult situation. That verb isn’t regularly used with easygoing scenarios. You "created" something that didn’t exist before. These types of verbs draw the reader in from the get go, making you look good.
2.2 Adjectives and Adverbs are Friends
Use adjectives and adverbs to make the sentence more dynamic and to give more nuance to your document. For example you can say "My work improved delivery and rollout." OR "My work ensures fast delivery and frictionless rollout." . I think the second option is a lot better and if you can add some metrics on this, it's is even better. The flip side of using adjectives is to not get the sentence too weight down by using too many adjectives, then it’s just sounds like a press release not a self review. Sprinkle them where they have most impact!
2.3 Primacy and Recency
Here’s a fun fact: humans have something called the primacy and recency effect, so they remember what they read or heard first and what they heard or read last. We’re going to use this on a smaller scale in our sentences and paragraphs. The way we do that is by starting the sentence with the action that you took and by always putting the impact, result, achievement at the very end. Let’s look at at an example of this: "I collaborated with team X to find the missing link between sales and customer engagement." OR "I collaborated with team X on identifying the link between sales and customer engagement, resulting in a 20% increase in sales.". Similarly, you can also say something along the lines of " I achieved a 20% increase in sales by cross-collaborating with team X ." Of course, sometimes you need a sentence here and there that doesn’t exactly follow this rule, but by and large you want to make sure that you take advantage of the psychological trick as much as when writing your self review!
2.4 Careful of the PAST TENSE
Do not talk about the good things you’re doing in paste tense! That implies it was a one and done but perhaps that’s not really the message you want to convey. Let’s look at an example: “In the past year I was proactive about learning new skills for data analysis” instead you’d say “I am continuously learning new skills, focusing on data analysis most recently”.
2.5 Keep the Rhythm
Keep the rhythm going by shortening sentences where appropriate. A good resource for this is the "Write like an Amazonian" cheat sheet that was published by the Fact of the Day 1 newsletter which I will link below if you want to read it.
Let's look at an example of a paragraph and how we can shorten it: "There was an issue with the checkout page for some of our customers. It kept on refreshing the checkout page and the customers didn’t get a chance to input their credit cards. This was a big deal, we were losing money because people couldn't checkout. I worked long hours to understand why this was happening and after a while I found the root cause. I spent a good chunk of work fixing the issue but I made it in the end. "
Again, this is a good sentiment and I’m not even saying that this is a bad example but rather that we can improve how it sounds. For example, it I would re-write it to sound something like "I identified an issue with the checkout page that impacted our sales (-37% MoM). By investigating the checkout flow against 15 different scenarios I identified the root cause and implemented a quick fix to maintain business continuity. "
Now THAT is a great example: it's clear why this was an important problem - the drop is sales is 37% MoM, you talk about what you did to fix the issue while not complaining that it too you a long time and it gives you a good opening to talk about how you thought about short term action vs long term action.
2.5 Use Corporate Language
Many think it’s too pretentious, many think it’s not for them, but in a sea of folks writing their self reviews like it’s their 5th grade assignment, yours will stand out for how professional it seems, for how well you understand how the corporate world works. While you shouldn’t go too wild with the terms, similar to the adjectives and adverbs, perhaps you can use these in a finishing statement to a paragraph. Let’s look at two basic examples: "I saw there was a problem with our service and created an alarm for when data goes off the rails." Does the data go off the rails there? Not in your review it doesn't!!
Instead you'd say something like: "I identified the issues, consulted with stakeholders across the department to fully grasp the problem space and proceeded to create an alarm to allow early detection and correction of mismatched data."
Here's another example: "In the following year, I want to do more work with other teams in our department. I think we can learn from each other and how we work since we all do things differently." That's not bad from an intention perspective but it’s a bit bland in terms of how it’s phrased. It’s not clear what the result would be and why you should invest time in this action. Let’s look at an alternative to this: "In the following year, I want to use my knowledge in more cross-team projects, to create more synergy between the teams in our department, streamline processes, unifying knowledge and ways of working."
Now isn’t that just a wonderful sentence to end your review on? You’ve got great intent, you’re mentioning that you’re sharing your knowledge with others and the result is unifying how teams work and what they know. Delightful!
3. Self Review Final Tips
Before we end, here are a few last tips:
If you don’t have an annual feedback process, make sure to gather some informal feedback from your close stakeholders. Pay attention to what they think you should improve upon and understand how you can reflect that in your self review.
Invest an appropriate amount of time in your review. This means don’t leave it to the night before the deadline otherwise you might not have time to gather the metrics or really try to come up with a compelling story!
After a while you will become completely text blind. My favorite trick for this is to ask a person that you trust to read your document and give you some feedback on it. Unfortunately there’s only so much we can do ourselves. But if it’s a case of force major and you REALLY have no one to turn to or it’s the middle of the night and you can’t wake anyone up, here’s one last trick for evaluating what you wrote: read the document from the end to beginning, paragraph by paragraph. The new sequence will wake up your brain and you might pick up things you ignored before. It’s not as good as having a different person read it but it can help.
I hope you found this article useful, I'd be very interested in understanding your opinion on it!
That's it for today, folks!
Until next time, this is Laura signing off.
