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Forbes
5 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Why Stellar Performance Reviews Aren't Getting You Promoted
You've been crushing your performance reviews for years, yet you're still stuck in the same role while teammates get promoted. If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. According to research from Textio, organizations recognize 5-15% of their employees as high performers on average. That leaves a large chunk of the workforce who are overperforming but still don't make the cut for a promotion. The issue is that performance reviews measure how well you execute your current job, not whether you're ready for the next level. This creates what experts term a "performance paradox"—the better you become at your current role, the more indispensable you appear in that position, which can actually limit career advancement opportunities. Stellar performance reviews, while necessary, aren't enough to climb the corporate ladder. Let's look at seven reasons why you might not be getting promoted and what you can do about it. The Issue: Your performance review measures how well you complete assigned tasks, meet deadlines and achieve predetermined goals. These metrics reflect your competence in your current role but say little about your potential to handle greater responsibilities or lead others. What to Do Instead: Start tracking and communicating metrics that demonstrate your strategic impact. Instead of reporting that you "completed all projects on time," quantify how your work contributed to broader business objectives. For example, "Led a process improvement initiative that reduced team workload by 20%, enabling the department to take on three additional client projects without increasing headcount." Focus on outcomes that show you're thinking beyond your job description. Document instances where you've identified problems before they escalated, proposed solutions that benefited multiple departments or influenced decisions outside your direct area of responsibility. The Issue: Your immediate manager may appreciate your work, but promotion decisions often involve multiple stakeholders who have limited visibility into your day-to-day contributions. Ultimately, promotion decisions are influenced by factors beyond direct supervisor recommendations, including peer feedback and visibility to senior leadership. What to Do Instead: Actively build relationships with influential stakeholders across the organization. Volunteer for cross-functional projects that put you in front of senior leaders. Share your expertise through internal presentations, thought leadership pieces or by mentoring colleagues in other departments. Create opportunities to showcase your work to a broader audience. When you achieve results, don't just report them to your manager. Find forums to share your insights with leadership teams, whether through formal presentations or informal conversations. The Issue: Performance reviews typically evaluate your individual contributions, but most promotions require you to influence, guide or manage others. Being an excellent individual contributor doesn't automatically translate to leadership effectiveness, and many organizations have learned this lesson the hard way. What to Do Instead: Seek opportunities to demonstrate leadership skills before you're officially promoted. Take initiative on team projects, mentor junior colleagues or volunteer to lead cross-departmental initiatives. Document specific examples of how you've influenced others, resolved workplace conflict, or guided teams through challenges. Focus on developing what researchers call "political intelligence"—the ability to navigate organizational dynamics, build coalitions and influence without formal authority. This skill set is often more predictive of promotion success than technical competence alone. The Issue: High performers often excel at following directions and meeting expectations, but promotion requires demonstrating that you can create value without explicit guidance. If you consistently wait for your manager to assign you stretch projects or development opportunities, you're signaling that you're not yet ready for increased responsibility. What to Do Instead: Identify problems or opportunities that align with business priorities and propose solutions. Don't wait for permission to improve processes, suggest new approaches or take on additional responsibilities that benefit the organization. Start acting like you already have the role you want. If you're seeking a management position, begin demonstrating management behaviors. If you want a strategic role, start thinking and communicating strategically. This approach helps decision-makers envision you in the new position. The Issue: Many star employees assume their work speaks for itself, but Carla Harris, Vice Chairman at Morgan Stanley, has a powerful saying: "You can't let your work speak for you; work doesn't speak." Your performance review might document what you've accomplished, but it likely doesn't capture the strategic value you bring to the organization or your potential for greater impact. What to Do Instead: Develop a straightforward narrative about your unique value proposition and career trajectory. Practice articulating not just what you've done but why it matters and how it positions you for greater responsibilities. Frame your accomplishments in terms of business impact rather than task completion. Make it clear that you're not just seeking recognition for past performance. You're actively preparing for and pursuing promotion opportunities. The Issue: Promotion decisions are rarely made in isolation. They involve complex considerations about team dynamics, company culture and interpersonal relationships. Decision-makers evaluate not just your individual performance but also how you'll fit into the broader organization. What to Do Instead: Invest deliberately in building relationships across the organization. This isn't about office politics in the negative sense. It's about understanding how work gets done, who influences key decisions and how you can contribute to collective success. Seek feedback from colleagues at different levels and in various departments. Their perspectives can reveal blind spots that don't surface in traditional performance reviews, helping you understand how others perceive your promotion potential. The Issue: The skills that made you successful in your current role may not be the same skills required for a promotion. Performance reviews typically focus on current competencies rather than future potential, creating a gap between what you're being evaluated on and what you need to develop for career advancement. What to Do Instead: Proactively identify the skills and experiences required for your target role and create a development plan to acquire them. This might involve seeking additional training, taking on stretch assignments or finding mentors who can guide your growth. Be honest about areas where you need development and take concrete steps to address them. Organizations are more likely to promote someone who demonstrates self-awareness and commitment to growth than someone who appears to believe they're already perfect for the next level. While positive performance reviews demonstrate that you can excel in your current role, career advancement requires proving that you can create value at the next level. The most successful professionals understand that getting promoted isn't a reward for past performance. It's an investment in future potential. By aligning your efforts with the factors that drive promotion decisions, you can transform your excellent performance reviews from a source of frustration into a launching pad for career advancement.
Forbes
12-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Vibes Hiring On The Rise: Are Skills Taking A Back Seat For Companies?
What vibes are you bringing to your career? An analysis of over 10,000 interviews by Textio found that vibes hiring is common in the workplace - where personality and soft-skills such as likability form the basis for the hiring decision. The new study reveals that a job seeker who receives an offer is 12 times more likely to be described as having a 'great personality' compared to those who didn't get the gig. 'Too many hiring teams rely on memory, gut instinct, or informal messages to capture what happened in an interview," according to Kieran Snyder, Chief Scientist Emeritus and co-founder at Textio. "Unfortunately, memory fades, gut instincts are often unreliable, and informal messages aren't a hiring system. Structured, skills-based interview assessments are a non-negotiable for any effective hiring process,' Snyder says. So, for job seekers, what's the message - more good vibes, less hard skills? And what do companies risk, or gain, when hiring for likability? Is it really necessary to invest in formalized, skills-based hiring systems - especially for small businesses? Are companies hiring based on vibes? getty Candidates receiving job offers also receive the following adjectives in the interview process: In this age of skills-based hiring, where college degrees aren't supposed to matter as much as in the past, what's the message for job seekers? Turns out, personality fit still matters - but it's not a good idea to base a career decision on just vibes. 'It's crazy how often hiring still comes down to a 'gut feeling' instead of actual skill alignment,' according to Olivia Crawford, CEO of Bettabite. "No wonder so many companies struggle with turnover or poor role fit. Hiring based on vibes might feel good at the moment, but it's not a strategy, it's a gamble. We need more tools (and willingness) to assess candidates on what actually matters long-term." Work is a place where we spend a majority of our waking hours. Devoted to a cause, product or purpose in the pursuit of a livelihood, getting along with others is part of the deal. The ability to interact (or perhaps even tolerate?) a co-worker or team member is a vital criteria. Would you hire someone with epic skills and a toxic personality? In a tight job market, it seems that soft skills like collaboration, enthusiasm and willingness to take on new responsibilities are the difference-makers in the interview process. Experts point out that skills and performance based evaluations are the strongest predictors of hiring success. And those assessments can rate soft skills as part of the process. Restaurant owner Michael Passalacqua says that he's been using a skills-based hiring tool for the last 14 years. In an industry notorious for high turnover (food service), the tool has helped him to assess the fit for new employees. "It's not a test," says Passalacqua, adding, "There's no right or wrong answer." The process doesn't take long, which is important. One challenge for candidate assessment methods is they can discourage candidates if they drag on or seem too onerous. This is particularly a disadvantage for restaurants, which often need to make hiring decisions quickly in a competitive market, according to Liz Palmieri, a talent optimization consultant, says that The Predictive Index is a great way to assess candidates in an objective and scientific way. "When we align a candidate to the job and take a look at the behaviors, it's a very objective process," she explains. Predictive Index has "over 400 validity studies proving we measure what we say we measure," Palmieri says. Assessing candidate skill levels, in an objective way, can be extremely valuable. And, in some roles, mission-critical. However, in organizations where teamwork, innovation and collaboration are foundational to the culture, relationships matter. Leaders have to trust their instincts when it comes to merging personalities inside a team. For applicants, the ability to play well with others gets you into the game. But your skills will help you to play it. And win. Assessments can evaluate for personality traits and soft skills. 'Assessments let you identify someone who has the right traits for a role,' Passalacqua says. For companies who rely on these types of assessments, that flexibility might be an advantage for those looking to change jobs or industries. After hiring, behavioral profiles can inform leaders of ways to interact with employees - understanding their preferences inside of both challenges and opportunities. The whole idea behind assessments is to create alignment between the company, the employee and the role. Feeling good is nice, but performing well is where career satisfaction really happens. Good vibes without a good fit for the role is a recipe for disaster. For job seekers today, the message is clear: a willingness to focus on soft skills (like communication, interpersonal awareness and emotional intelligence) can go a long way in the job interview. Hiring focuses on ability and aptitude, in companies that are focused on growth. Candidates need to combine vital soft skills with hard results on an assessment. That way, you'll be giving the hiring manager more than just good vibes in the job interview.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Report Finds Glaring Difference In Feedback Job Interviewers Give About Men Vs. Women
A new report is revealing what many frustrated job seekers have long suspected: It's not what you know, but what your interviewers think about your personality that can get you the job. In a Textio report published Tuesday, job candidates who received offers were significantly more likely to be described as having a 'great personality' than those who didn't get offers — and for men and women, that often meant wildly different things. To figure this out, Textio, a talent optimization platform commonly used by human resources professionals, analyzed 10,377 internal job interview assessments done by hiring managers and recruiters across more than 3,900 job candidates, mostly in North America. What Textio found was that hiring teams for corporate roles, including marketing, legal, engineering and sales, were being swayed by a job candidate's vibes. Shortly after job interviews, hiring managers used Textio's platform to document internal feedback about a job candidate, and the type of feedback they were more likely to share was about a job candidate's charm, 'great energy' and 'friendly' personality ― not their relevant skills. Ultimately, managers were more likely to hire people they liked. Kieran Snyder, Textio co-founder and chief scientist emeritus, said the finding 'shows that our bias begins before the person's even hired. So candidates coming in, you see this real gendered impact of the way that they're described.' The kind of personality feedback women and men got after interviewing was radically different. According to the Textio report, women candidates who got job offers were more likely to be described by interviewers as 'bubbly,' 'pleasant' and 'polite.' Meanwhile, men who got job offers were described as 'level-headed,' 'confident' and 'strong.' Being pleasantly bubbly is not a bad trait to have at work, but it's not the kind of trait that will get you promoted, which is one reason why this feedback is problematic. 'Being friendly doesn't get you a leadership opportunity,' Snyder said. 'And so when we assess some groups of people — such as women, especially Black women and Latino women, for these attributes more than others ― we inherently set them up for fewer opportunities down the line.' Sociologist Lauren Rivera, a professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, said the 'bubbly' feedback women get is an example of the 'fraught labyrinth' of how women get judged for both competence and warmth, citing the research of psychologist Alice Eagly on this topic. 'We disproportionately attune to women's warmth when judging their underlying suitability,' Rivera explained. 'We attune to the fact of 'Are they friendly? Are they approachable?' more than we do for men, and research has shown that there's a backlash for women who are perceived as violating these kind of prescriptive gender stereotypes.' The Textio data set of written interview assessments didn't contain metadata about candidate race and ethnicity, but previous research has found that women of color face what researchers call 'double jeopardy,' because they deal with both gender and racial biases at work. Black women professionals are more likely to receive subjective feedback that they are 'difficult' or 'angry,' for example. Ironically, the candidates who got relevant feedback about their skills were the candidates being rejected. Successful job candidates were being praised for their good vibes, while rejected candidates got skills-related takedowns. 'The candidates who didn't get offers, they had more feedback, actually, that was written about them, but less of it commented on their personality, and more of it commented on their skills,' Snyder said. In Snyder's view, 'it's because interviewers feel more compelled to justify a no-hire decision.' Why not hire people you like to work with? It's not bad to want to hang out with your colleagues, but that should not be the reason you hire and promote them. The Textio report is just the latest showing Americans love to hire for 'chemistry' or 'cultural fit' over relevant skills and performance. Rivera, who has conducted several studies on this topic, said that many hiring managers use shared interest in sports or mutual passion for 'Love Is Blind' as indicators of a good coworker. 'We use that liking and that similarity as a proxy for: Are they going to be collegial?' Rivera said. But 'just because you like someone in the moment, on the basis of a 20-minute conversation, doesn't mean they will actually be a respectful or helpful coworker, but we confuse those two things.' 'We're overestimating the degree to which liking is actually relevant, and overestimating the degree to which we can actually grow to like people who are different from us,' she said. And if managers keep doing this, they will not only lose out on great candidates, they will lose great performers, too. Job feedback about your personality ― even when it's about how wonderful you are to work with ― is a lose-lose for everyone involved. Snyder said high performers 'tend to get 'Great job. Keep going, good for you.' And what we've seen in prior research is that when the feedback is low-quality, even if it's positive, people are more likely to quit.' To avoid subjective judgments like 'not a good fit,' job interviewers should ideally ask each candidate about their relevant knowledge, skills and abilities they can bring to the role with the same questions, in the same order. Rivera suggested interviewers avoid icebreaker questions like, 'What do you like to do in your spare time?' to make sure candidates are not being judged on shared interests. But for now, reports like Textio's show that this kind of fair, less-biased interviewing is still not happening enough. 'We're not looking at the right place. We're not looking at their skills and behaviors,' Snyder said. 'We're looking at how they make us feel.' Why 'Culture Fit' Is A Failed Idea In American Hiring 4 Simple Fixes That Make Job Interviews More Fair, Less Biased These Coded Words Reveal Bosses' Biases Against Certain Employees
