How This New Software Hopes to Remove Bias From Performance Reviews

Employee Benefit News featured Confirm in a detailed piece exploring how new HR software is tackling one of the most persistent problems in talent management: bias in performance reviews.

The January 2024 article came at an important moment in Confirm's growth — shortly after our auto-calibration feature launch — and helped introduce our approach to a broad audience of HR practitioners and benefits professionals who are grappling with fairness in talent decisions.

The piece examines a challenge that most HR leaders recognize but struggle to address: performance reviews are supposed to be meritocratic, but research consistently shows they're heavily influenced by factors that have nothing to do with merit. The manager's personal relationship with the employee. The employee's communication style. The visibility of their contributions. Whether their work happened recently enough to be salient at review time.

Confirm's approach to this problem starts with data. Organizational network analysis captures signals about how employees actually work — who they collaborate with, who relies on them, how their influence extends across the organization — rather than relying entirely on a single manager's perspective. This additional data doesn't eliminate bias, but it provides a counterweight to the impressionistic assessments that dominate traditional reviews.

The auto-calibration feature covered in the article takes this further by automatically flagging rating distributions that look anomalous — managers who consistently rate everyone at the same level, teams whose distributions diverge significantly from organizational norms, demographic patterns that suggest systematic disparities. These signals give HR leaders visibility into where calibration conversations need to happen.

For HR leaders who've struggled to make progress on review bias with training and process changes alone, the Employee Benefit News piece offers a compelling case for why data infrastructure matters.

Read the full article: How This New Software Hopes to Remove Bias From Performance Reviews — Employee Benefit News