Examples · from the labelled Maya sample · an invented person
Self evaluation examples for a performance review: five paragraphs with the numbers in.
Maya R. is an invented customer support team lead. Her company's form has four headings and an 800-word limit; she typed eleven rough bullets and got back the finished self-evaluation. Below, five of those bullets side by side with the paragraph each became, and the reason the number sits where it does.
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1. Key accomplishments, the opening
What she typed
took over the team in Feb when Dan left, 6 people now 9
What went into the form
I took over the support team in February when Dan left, and my first job was to keep the service steady through a handover nobody had planned for. The team has grown from six to nine people since then, and every measure we track is better than it was in January.
Why
The first sentence names the scope and the date; the second gives the headline number (six to nine) and a claim the next paragraphs will prove. No adjectives yet.
2. The result with its cause
What she typed
CSAT went from 86 to 93 (q1 -> q3); first response time 4h -> 51 min after we changed the queue rules
What went into the form
Customer satisfaction rose from 86% in Q1 to 93% in Q3. The biggest single driver was a change to the queue rules I proposed in March: tickets are now routed by product area and age rather than first-come, first-served, and the median first response time fell from about four hours to 51 minutes.
Why
Two numbers, each with a before and an after, and the thing you did between them. A result without its cause reads as luck; the cause without the number reads as activity.
3. A number that is not yours
What she typed
ran the churn-save pilot with sales, saved ~$210k ARR (their number)
What went into the form
Sales attributes about $210,000 of retained annual recurring revenue to the pilot; that is their figure, and the process is now standard.
Why
Say whose number it is. A reviewer who later hears “that was sales' estimate” trusts the whole document less; a reviewer who read it in your own words trusts it more.
4. Areas for development: one real miss
What she typed
bad Q2 — two people off sick, backlog hit 900, took 5 weeks to clear
What went into the form
Q2 was the hard part of the year. Two people were off sick for most of May, the backlog reached 900 open tickets, and it took five weeks to bring it back under 200. I kept the team going and I was honest with customers about wait times, but I should have asked for temporary cover in the second week rather than the fourth. Next time I will set a backlog number that triggers that request automatically.
Why
The miss is stated with its numbers, once; what you did; what changes next time. A self-evaluation with no hard part reads as a sales page, and a reviewer who knows about Q2 is waiting to see whether you will mention it.
5. The ask, as a plain sentence
What she typed
want: senior team lead / manager title, and the pay band that goes with it
What went into the form
Given the scope I have carried this year, a team of nine, hiring, a migration and a cross-team programme, I would like to discuss moving to the Senior Team Lead title and the pay band that goes with it.
Why
The ask goes in the goals section, as one sentence, with the scope in front of it. Hinting at it in three places reads as nerves; saying it once reads as a plan.
The rule under all five
Every paragraph has a before, an after, and the thing you did between them. Every number has an owner (yours, or named as someone else's). The hard part is in, once. The ask is one sentence, in the goals, with the scope in front of it. That is the whole method; the rest is your year.
Three questions
How long should a self-evaluation be?
Whatever the form allows; most company templates run 600 to 900 words across four headings. Maya's came to about 800 words under an 800-word limit. If there is no limit, four headings and five paragraphs of the kind above is plenty.
What if I do not have numbers?
You have more than you think: time something took before and after, how many people, how many tickets or customers or deals, a date you hit. Where there truly is none, write the specific thing you did and who it was for; a named person or team is the next best thing to a number.
Should I mention something that went wrong?
One real miss, with its numbers, what you did, and what changes next time. Leaving it out does not hide it from a manager who was there; putting it in, once, is what makes the rest of the document believable.
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