Evaluate employee performance
Little of this can be handed to software today.
Software can assemble the case and recommend an answer, and that is genuinely useful. The decision stays with a person because someone has to be accountable for it. Treating the recommendation as the decision is how automation projects fail.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Judgment, authorisation and strategy |
| Jobs that do it | 34 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Generalist agents, Models and routing |
| O*NET activity | Judging the Qualities of Objects, Services, or People (4.A.2.a.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 34 occupations that perform it.
- Manage sales team, including setting goals, providing incentives, and evaluating employee performance.
- Plan and direct staffing, training, and performance evaluations to develop and control sales and service programs.
- Assign, supervise, and review the activities of public relations staff.
- Assign, supervise, and review the activities of fundraising staff.
- Supervise or provide leadership to subordinate security professionals, performing activities such as hiring, investigating applicants' backgrounds, training, assigning work, evaluating performance, or disciplining.
- Assign and review the work of systems analysts, programmers, and other computer-related workers.
- Monitor and evaluate the performance of accounting and other financial staff, recommending and implementing personnel actions, such as promotions and dismissals.
- Hire or evaluate staff.
- Hire, train, evaluate, or discharge staff or resolve personnel grievances.
- Evaluate instructor performance and the effectiveness of training programs, providing recommendations for improvement.
- Recruit, hire, train, and evaluate primary and supplemental staff and recommend personnel actions for programs and services.
- Direct, coordinate, and evaluate the activities of personnel, including support staff engaged in administering academic institutions, departments, or alumni organizations.
- Organize and direct worker training programs, resolve personnel problems, hire new staff, and evaluate employee performance in dining and lodging facilities.
- Train new workers or evaluate their performance.
- Observe and monitor staff performance to ensure efficient operations and adherence to facility's policies and procedures.
- Direct, supervise and evaluate work activities of medical, nursing, technical, clerical, service, maintenance, and other personnel.
- Hire, supervise, or evaluate engineers, technicians, researchers, or other staff.
- Hire and train employees, and evaluate their performance.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for judgment, authorisation and strategy, and what it costs.
There is nothing here worth buying beyond a good assistant. Software assembles the case and recommends an answer, which any $20 assistant already does; the decision is yours, and no product on this page changes that.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Generalist agents
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
34 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Advertising and Promotions Managers
- Computer and Information Systems Managers
- Education Administrators, Postsecondary
- Education and Childcare Administrators, Preschool and Daycare
- Exercise Physiologists
- Fire Inspectors and Investigators
- First-Line Supervisors of Correctional Officers
- First-Line Supervisors of Entertainment and Recreation Workers, Except Gambling Services
- First-Line Supervisors of Firefighting and Prevention Workers
- First-Line Supervisors of Gambling Services Workers
- First-Line Supervisors of Passenger Attendants
- First-Line Supervisors of Personal Service Workers
- First-Line Supervisors of Police and Detectives
- First-Line Supervisors of Production and Operating Workers
- Food Service Managers
- Fundraising Managers
- Gambling Managers
- Industrial Production Managers
- Industrial-Organizational Psychologists
- Investment Fund Managers
- Lodging Managers
- Medical and Health Services Managers
- Natural Sciences Managers
- Parking Enforcement Workers
- Postmasters and Mail Superintendents
- Property, Real Estate, and Community Association Managers
- Public Relations Managers
- Recreation Workers
- Residential Advisors
- Sales Managers
- Security Managers
- Spa Managers
- Training and Development Managers
- Treasurers and Controllers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Evaluate personnel capabilities or performance”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.