Confirm's perspective was featured in Business Insider in a piece examining the growing backlash against stack ranking and forced performance distribution systems — and what employees can do when they find themselves in one.
Stack ranking — the practice of forcing a predetermined distribution of high, middle, and low performers — has been controversial since Jack Welch popularized it at GE. Microsoft famously abandoned it in 2013 after research suggested it was damaging collaboration and driving away talent. Yet forced ranking refuses to die, and Business Insider's piece explores why it persists despite its well-documented problems.
The article centers on the employee experience of stack ranking: what it feels like to be evaluated against colleagues in a zero-sum framework where someone has to be at the bottom regardless of whether the work quality warrants it. Confirm's perspective — that forced ranking needs to die but alas refuses to do so — frames the piece's central argument.
The deeper problem with stack ranking isn't just that it feels unfair. It's that it's measuring the wrong thing. A performance rating should reflect an employee's contribution relative to the expectations of their role. Stack ranking instead measures relative contribution to the current peer group — which varies dramatically based on team composition, not just individual performance.
An employee who would be a top performer in most organizations can end up at the bottom of a stack rank simply by joining an exceptional team. The rating then follows them into compensation decisions, promotion considerations, and potentially termination conversations — not because of their performance, but because of their cohort.
Confirm exists, in part, to provide an alternative to the impressionistic ratings that stack ranking relies on — grounding assessments in organizational network data and structured peer feedback rather than manager gut feel and forced distributions.
Read the full article: My Company is Using Stack Rankings — Business Insider
Performance reviews that measure contribution, not cohort
Confirm's approach grounds assessments in evidence — not forced distributions. Learn how →
