Using AI to Write Your Annual Performance Review 

There may not be a single soul on planet Earth who enjoys writing an annual performance review, whether it’s an employee writing a self-evaluation or a manager writing one about an employee. If you’re an exception, consider yourself lucky… or a sicko. 

Thankfully, it is possible to use AI to write your annual performance reviews. Of course, we don’t recommend solely relying on AI. After all, the review should be a representative of your performance or the performance of your employee. If it’s not, it’s going to be obvious you just used ChatGPT to make it all up. 

But there are some things AI can help with when it comes to performance reviews. These include: 

• Finding the right words to effectively but gently convey criticism 

• Saving time by taking bulleted lists of achievements and opportunities to form them into full sentences/paragraphs 

• Outlining review best practices prior to your employees’ self-reviews 

[Read more: Professional and Modern PowerPoint Templates] 

AI Performance Review Generators 

Believe it or not, there are actually tools out there designed to help you utilize the power of AI specifically for writing performance reviews. A simple Google search will deliver tons of results.  

How helpful these generators are is for you to determine, but in our analysis, the old saying is true… you get what you pay for. There are free options out there, but they might be too simplistic to be all that helpful, especially if you really really really hate writing performance reviews. Then again, there are paid options out there too, though some of those may require you to pay for additional features you don’t need. 

ChatGPT Prompts for Performance Reviews 

One suggestion is to use ChatGPT itself to help you write your performance reviews. There’s a free version or an affordable paid version. Regardless, when writing your prompts keep these tips in mind. 

Tip 1: Explain your goal and desired outcome 

Make sure ChatGPT understands exactly what it is you’re trying to do and what you expect to be delivered. In the case of performance reviews, this might mean detailing the tone of the content, specific examples that should be included and the desired format/organization. 

Tip 2: Put ChatGPT in your shoes 

Help the AI understand you, your role and your needs by sharing your job title, your responsibilities and what your goal is for the performance review you need generated. A helpful way of getting ChatGPT to “think” from your perspective is to ask it to “image you’re marketing manager who need to write a performance review for an underperforming employee who has been with the company for 3 years…” as an example. 

Tip 3: Give concrete example 

If you have samples of past performance reviews that you want ChatGPT to imitate, share them. Giving the AI this context can help ensure you generate the content you’re looking for. 

With all of this in mind, here is an example of what your prompt could look like: 

“Imagine you’re the manager of a 7-person marketing team that creates mailers promoting cold storage solutions to relevant businesses. You have to write an annual performance review for an employee, Dennis Nedry, who is intelligent, has tons of ingenuity and understands the business well, but has a habit of sharing the company’s proprietary secrets with competitors. Write this performance review, including detailed sections for Strengths and Opportunities using the below format. Make sure the tone is direct, but not harsh, and supportive.” 

You can also bring ChatGPT into your Word docs using our ChatGPT for Word add-in. This makes it simple to take information from your Word docs and use AI to craft it into exactly what you’re looking for. 

Use AI to Help Your Employees Write Their Self Evaluations 

If you’re a manager, another cool idea is to use AI to train your employees on completing their self-evaluations. You can use a similar process to the one mentioned above to get some detailed notes, but you’ll also want put it in a format that you can present to your team. 

That’s where we come in. Use our ChatGPT for PowerPoint add-in to quickly create a PowerPoint presentation based on those notes or based on a topic so that you can establish expectations with your team members before they write their reviews.