Rethinking Performance Reviews with Rekog
The State of Performance Reviews Today
To truly understand how Rekog changes the performance review process, let's first take a look at the most common approach companies use right now.
Performance reviews are essential for several reasons:
- Aligning employee goals with organizational objectives
- Facilitating continuous personal and professional growth
- Maintaining a motivated, high-performing workforce
- Supporting decisions about compensation and promotions
But the current process is deeply flawed. Here’s what it usually looks like:
1. Performance Goals and Expectations
At the start of each quarter, you and your manager decide on a set of goals—usually using frameworks like OKRs or KPIs. These goals are supposed to guide your work and reflect both personal and company objectives. However, in the fast-paced world of software engineering, priorities often change before the quarter ends. Suddenly, you find yourself torn between addressing urgent, real-time challenges or fulfilling goals that no longer seem relevant.
While some goal-setting frameworks, like OKRs, claim to account for shifting priorities, in practice, many companies don’t update goals frequently enough to keep up. This makes the review process feel disconnected from what engineers are actually working on day-to-day.
2. Self-Assessment
Employees are then asked to rate their own performance. Here lies another flaw: self-assessments are inherently biased. Naturally, employees want to maximize their chances of promotion and bonuses, leading them to overrate their achievements. Conversely, some high-performers may underrate themselves, either out of modesty or because they tend to be overly self-critical.
Even in companies with a culture that encourages honesty, self-assessments are colored by recent experiences. A particularly challenging or successful project might overshadow the overall body of work. This is where Rekog steps in—data-backed insights can help balance the human tendency to focus too much on recent events.
3. Manager’s Assessment
Managers then step in to review, often wrestling with the same issue: how can they fairly evaluate employees when their direct exposure to each person’s day-to-day work is limited?
Moreover, in many organizations, promotions and raises are scarce resources. Even if an employee is outperforming, there may not be an immediate growth path available. This forces managers into a balancing act—acknowledge high performance while tempering expectations. Rekog solves this by providing managers with continuous insights, allowing them to track and celebrate achievements in real-time, even when growth opportunities aren’t immediately available.
The Inefficiencies of Traditional Reviews
Traditional reviews are built on subjective judgments, outdated goals, and inconsistent data. And the research supports this:
- A Gallup survey found that only 2% of CHROs of Fortune 500 companies think their performance management system works.
- Major companies like Microsoft, Dell, and Adobe have abandoned annual reviews in favor of continuous feedback systems.
- Laszlo Bock, former head of people at Google, states that only 30% of employees view their company's review process favorably—and those are usually the underperformers gaming the system.
The traditional review process isn’t just broken; it’s holding back both employees and companies. But what’s the alternative?
Performance Reviews with Rekog
Rekog offers a radical alternative by replacing subjective, sporadic evaluations with objective, continuous analysis based on real-time data and feedback.
1. AI-Curated Profiles
Rekog integrates with platforms like GitHub, Slack, and Stack Overflow to gather objective data on employee contributions. It builds AI-curated profiles that evolve continuously, based on real work:
- Code contributions on GitHub
- Public forum interactions on platforms like Stack Overflow
- Feedback from peers and managers tied to specific tasks
This provides an accurate, real-time snapshot of each employee’s skills and performance. Instead of relying on self-assessments or fragmented memory, Rekog uses objective, external data to ensure fairness and accuracy.
2. Continuous, Contextual Feedback
Why wait for quarterly or annual reviews when you can provide feedback in real time? Rekog enables event-based feedback, allowing employees to receive insights tied directly to their work—whether it's a clean code merge, a helpful Slack response, or a well-executed project.
Feedback doesn’t have to be constant or overwhelming—it can appear on an employee’s profile periodically, such as once a month, or whenever it’s most relevant. And the feedback isn’t forced; it’s voluntary. If you notice that a colleague has written particularly readable code, you can leave feedback on the spot. This way, valuable insights that might otherwise be forgotten are captured and turned into actionable feedback.
3. Enabling Proactive Growth
Rekog gives managers the tools to detect skill gaps and proactively assign Milestones—structured, skill-building tasks to help employees grow. This transforms performance reviews from reactive evaluations into positive, growth-oriented conversations.
By addressing areas of development early, managers can coach employees in real time. This means instead of a negative review at the end of the quarter, employees are given opportunities to improve throughout the review period, resulting in a final meeting that's constructive and encouraging.
4. Streamlining the Review Process
Instead of relying on fragmented notes or outdated objectives, Rekog offers a living profile of each employee. Managers can access a real-time view of contributions, feedback, and growth. This means performance reviews aren’t based on guesswork—they’re based on facts.
Rekog enables managers to oversee larger teams more effectively. By automating the data collection and feedback process, Rekog frees managers to focus on providing personalized coaching rather than getting bogged down in paperwork.
Rekog: The Future of Performance Management
By using Rekog, organizations can eliminate the inefficiencies of traditional performance reviews. Employees receive timely, relevant feedback based on real events, helping them understand their strengths and areas for improvement. Managers gain access to AI-curated profiles that provide a holistic view of each employee’s performance, enabling more accurate reviews, fair promotions, and better management of the team.
Rekog transforms the performance review process from subjective and cumbersome to transparent, data-driven, and growth-focused—resulting in a more motivated, engaged, and high-performing workforce.
Experience the future of performance reviews with Rekog: Where growth and recognition are driven by real data, not outdated processes.