Can we please stop taking old HR ideas and presenting them as new?
It’s a Spicy 🌶️ Friday post!
Exhibit A: Someone I know was recently interviewing for a job and was told they’d go through a “top grading” interview. I’d never heard of it despite 25+ years in HR and leadership development. So I looked it up.
Oh. It’s walking through your resume while the interviewer asks probing questions and looks for inconsistencies. That’s how we interviewed before behavioral interviewing became all the rage in the early 2000s. The difference now? Some company resurrected it, added a ranking method (which we did anyway), gave it a name, and charges money for it.
Exhibit B: The scuttlebutt about scrapping performance reviews is back. This was quite the topic about 12ish years ago. And let’s be honest—performance reviews suck.
But CEB research from 2016 (now part of Gartner) found that when organizations eliminate ratings without building a strong culture of continuous coaching, employee performance drops by 10%. And then a 2019 study from Gartner found a decline of 16%.
The companies that successfully ditched reviews—like Adobe and GE—didn’t just eliminate the process. They replaced it with real-time coaching, continuous dialogue, and shared accountability. Most organizations that want to scrap reviews aren’t willing to make that investment.
So before you decide to eliminate your performance management process, ask yourself: are you ready to build what replaces it? Or do you want to be the cautionary tale in the next study?
And before you go to some fancy-a** “new” interviewing model and pay someone for it, talk to your old-timers about what worked for them.
Everything old is new again. Don’t believe me? Ask one of us Gen X’ers before you drop a coin. Baby, we’ve seen it all.
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