Let me guess: You’re here because your boss sent you a self evaluation form as part of your performance review, and you’ve been staring at it for 15 minutes, unable to write a single word.
Your hesitation is totally understandable! At best, self evaluations (and performance reviews in general) can feel like nothing more than another form of status update. At worst, they can feel like a high-stakes tightrope walk in which people are afraid of pointing out their mistakes or of praising themselves too highly.
Yep, it’s free. And trust us…it will help!
Despite their bad reputation, self evaluations (also known as self assessments or self appraisals) are worth taking seriously. A good self evaluation can have concrete benefits: improving your boss’ impression of you, putting you in line for a promotion, and even boosting your salary (more on how to do that later).
So let’s talk about how to write a self evaluation that shows the traits managers are looking for in high performers, along with examples of self evaluations you can build on.
Performance reviews are like fruitcakes at Christmas: Everyone hates them, yet they keep coming back, year after year. But why should discussing our job performance be so painful?
It’s not because we’re terrible team members—it’s because the system is flawed. Employees are under tremendous pressure to prove their worth during performance appraisals but often walk away feeling misunderstood, undervalued, and confused by vague feedback.
According to a survey of Millennials by TriNet, a human resources company:
So what can you do to make sure your manager understands what a stellar employee you are and reflect that in your overall performance assessment? Become your own biggest cheerleader and equip your manager to do the same.
If your manager isn’t holding up their side of the deal by giving you actionable, constructive feedback, you’ve got to do it yourself. Wee’ll show you how to highlight your accomplishments, growth areas, and goals in a way that makes you stand out from the pack.
First, let’s start with a solid self evaluation structure. It should look something like this:
If your manager or HR department gave you a form to fill out, that’s fine—but, most likely, it only exists for documentation purposes. If you really want to wow your manager, make sure everything in this outline is covered in your employee self appraisal, even if you have to add extra sections or pages.
This is similar to areas of accomplishment but important to call out on its own. Everybody has projects to work on, but your boss may have suggested other professional development goals for you to work toward. Maybe you’re supposed to be learning to use a piece of software, taking the lead on a project, or handling more customer management. If you haven’t discussed professional development with your manager, here are three free professional development templates to help you introduce these goals into your one-on-ones.
Ideally, you’ll also have some personal goals of your own to talk about, whether that’s improving your time management, giving more confident presentations, or leveling up your skills in a specific area of your work.
Regardless of the goal, in your self evaluation, you should show what progress you’ve made since your last assessment. Have you hit your benchmarks as planned? Hopefully, the answer is yes, but even if you haven’t fully achieved your goals, this can still be an opportunity to shine, as long as you show thoughtfulness and self-awareness. Bringing feedback from your last review into the next one will show you paid attention and care about your boss’s opinion.
Goal: Help our marketing team increase conversion rates from 3–5% on landing pages.
Action: Our marketing team has been focusing on beefing up our inbound campaigns, so I decided to go through the Hubspot Inbound Marketing Certification Course so I could speak our team’s language and help create better lead magnets. We didn’t quite reach our goal—we ended up increasing the conversion rate to 4.5%. However, this was important progress because it’s the first time we’ve done a project like this. I learned so much about testing and best practices, and now I feel ready to lead more tests in the coming year.
It can be tempting to gloss over this section with a quick summary of your duties—but don’t make that mistake. Don’t assume your manager will remember your accomplishments from the past year (or quarter or 90 days, depending on how often you have reviews) unless you draw attention to them. This section is your highlight reel, and if you’re gunning for a promotion, it’s also your audition.
For example: If you’re a significant contributor to a project, include it in this section. And don’t just write the name of the project; make sure you also highlight the project’s status, what your involvement was, and the impact this project had on the company. These details are important to your manager because:
I designed a new user flow last quarter. This took a significant amount of my work time, and it took collaborating with three different departments to make it a success. While I worked on this task, I took the opportunity to learn new software because I knew it would be a useful skill while I help out the design team (since Analisa is on leave).
I’m proud to say that I completed this project two days ahead of schedule. We used it to map out priorities for product development at the end of the quarter, and I think it will be useful as a reference document for the design team for several more years.
What if you can’t remember what you worked on? To refresh your memory, ask yourself if you:
If you can answer “yes” to one of these items, it might be an accomplishment worth mentioning. Take the time to dive deep—you never know what you (or your boss) might have forgotten!
Don’t want to dig through old emails? With Uptick, you can quickly search through your one-on-one meeting notes for keywords and find you wrote down along the way as well as your manager’s reactions.
This is the section of the self evaluation where you look under your own hood to figure out what makes you tick. What are the behaviors and circumstances that are helping you thrive, and what’s holding you back from being your most productive?
Answering a question that personal can seem intimidating, but remember: Managers want you to be self-aware. It makes their job much easier when you have the ability to call out triumphs and failings, and then self-correct. It’s even better if you understand the impact you’re having on the team (and vice versa). When you collect these insights and share them with your manager, they’re getting priceless information about team culture. To uncover insights, ask yourself these questions:
I’ve come to the realization that I often engage in negative self-talk. Sometimes it’s not even conscious—more of a feeling that “I could never learn that skill” or “I must not be very smart if this project is overwhelming me.” I don’t know if the team can tell, but this affects my confidence. I want to be able to take projects on with gusto, so this is something I’m going to work on. Do you have any resources that you recommend?
If your insights are more critical or they focus on other people, that’s okay. But it’s hard for your manager to help if you don’t give them specific examples and say how you’d like them to intervene. Describe the reason you think the challenge exists, why it’s hard for you, and how you’ve tried to overcome it. You may have overcome this challenge already, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a note of it.
The people who sit near me are often quite loud during the lunch hour, and that’s when I get the highest call volume from our customers. I’ve talked to them about it, but the issue hasn’t gotten much better. I’m not sure what to do about it. I need to be at my desk to take calls, but this situation makes it hard to focus on the customer. Can we talk about a way to fix this?