Field proof
Performance Reviews, Rebuilt
WO-001 · HR reviews & compensation · Sits in front of Criterion- Situation
- A 250-person civil engineering firm ran performance reviews through Criterion, their HR platform. One HR manager administered the entire process. Criterion could technically do reviews — the way a filing cabinet can technically do project management.
- What they tried
- Ten setup screens to launch one review cycle — and the real process lived in a spreadsheet next to the HR system. Sixty days later, the spreadsheet was gone. Launching a single review cycle meant a mandatory tour through ten setup screens, in the right order: employee groups, workflows, review templates — which could only be built out of learning-management "competencies" — review periods, then assigning people one at a time. Every month, HR cloned last month's workflows and renamed them, because building new ones was worse. The module fought back at every step: anonymity settings didn't do what they said, reviewer names stayed visible until the vendor could sort it out, and adding a group of employees fired emails to all of them instantly, with no preview and no way to hold anyone back — which nearly published a review to a manager who hadn't yet been told his employee was leaving. Directors couldn't see an employee's reviews side by side; they clicked into each one and scrolled to the bottom for a score. Goals were effectively unusable — an employee couldn't set one unless a review period and workflow already existed to attach it to. So the real process lived outside the system: HR built and hand-maintained a tracking spreadsheet — who's submitted, who's sitting on what, who needs chasing — because the software they paid for couldn't tell them.
- What we built
- A complete performance review and compensation system that sits in front of Criterion — built around how this company actually reviews people, not how a vendor's data model says they should. The review cycle runs end to end: employee self-reviews and manager reviews open in parallel and flow through HR, compensation, director, and executive approval, with routing decided automatically from the live org chart — if a step doesn't apply to someone, it doesn't exist for them. HR can bounce a review back to a manager without disturbing what the employee already submitted, and every step is audited and notifies exactly the people it should, automatically. 360 feedback works the way it's supposed to: respondents get a simple link, no login, no account, and results come back as an anonymized summary grouped by relationship, never by name — the anonymity problem the old system couldn't get right is structural here, not a setting. Quarterly goals live where reviews live; unfinished goals roll forward automatically, and changing an accepted goal takes a request, not a silent edit. Compensation runs in the same flow — increases are scored from review ratings against HR-managed tiers, adjustable at every approval level with a complete change history, and aligned to the actual payroll calendar. Criterion stays as the system of record: when a review is finalized, the finished record flows back into Criterion through its API, while everything else — the process, the visibility, the experience — runs in the company's own system. And directors finally get what they asked for from day one: every review for an employee, on one page, side by side.
- How fast
- Sixty days from the first working conversation to company-wide use — shaped throughout by direct, continuous feedback from the people who run the process.
- What changed
- The tracking spreadsheet is gone. Scheduling, notifications, reviews, approvals, and compensation all run in one system. The monthly clone-and-rename ritual is over. Directors see everything on one page. And the HR manager who used to spend her time administering software spends it doing HR.
- What's next
- Having proven itself running the entire review cycle in front of Criterion, the system is well positioned to take on more of what Criterion handles today — a decision the company is still weighing.
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