How does the applicant’s performance compare to that of other well – qualified individuals in similar roles? Please provide specific examples (e.g, what are the applicant’s principal strengths?).

Name of the Applicant: Jon
Industry: Technology
Theme: Learn and Lead
Function: Technology Consultant
Organization Structure: Flat
Role: Team Lead (Second Year)
Company: X
Recommender: Senior Manager

Jon’s rise in the organization started with a familiar path – trainee, associate, senior associate, consultant and lead consultant. What impressed me about his journey is that he achieved the promotions in just two years, whereas a typical candidate takes four years to do so. He is street smart with a deep awareness of human motivations but what separates him from the rest of the candidates with similar experience is his insatiable desire to learn and lead.

Our trainee program is a rigorous 1-month boot camp that puts the candidates through accelerated learning modules in technology, framework, communication and leadership. From the start, Jon was excelling in each session. The lead trainer noted that Jon understood the nuances of inter-group communication and completed the A-Z technology courses in two days - a record in the company. His performance was shared with us managers and team management.

The starting point for an associate is a low-risk or ‘safe’ project where they work under the supervision of a senior associate. As someone who had worked with high-performing candidates, I knew that wasting their time with mundane tasks is a recipe for attrition. We immediately assigned him to our in-house product <x>. The insurance documentation and analysis product had undergone over 200 iterations in 5 years with the team switching hands more than three times. The change in authorship of the software code has brought in a complexity that required a mind who could navigate the technological vocabulary as well as proficiently communicate with other developers on the team.

Since the product’s sales contribute close to a third of our company’s revenue, we knew that Jon’s involvement would help the team resolve some of the bugs that were preventing us from releasing the product on schedule. As we had predicted, Jon was instrumental in releasing the product before schedule.

While working intently on fixing the product workflow and logical errors, I noticed how Jon never missed a chance to discuss how he approached the problem. The whiteboard near our desk was the most populated area in our office with junior and senior technologists surrounding Jon to ask follow-up questions and capture his unique mindset to solve complex problems. This trait was even witnessed when he trained new recruits to adopt some of the best practices in product development. I wondered how he managed to play a pivotal part in the development of our product and also find free time to train his junior team members. His enthusiasm to own the project and the eagerness to learn and lead are traits that are rare in a professional. We knew that Jon is ready for bigger challenges and double-promoted him to a Consultant role

Our company is structured around Product development and Service team with the latter managing the client-facing and implementation roles. Since Jon demonstrated excellent communication skill and a maturity and understanding of group dynamics that was unique for his experience, he was assigned the role to integrate the product in over 50 offices in Europe for our largest client – Y, while seamlessly integrating with the customer App on 2 million mobile devices.

Any friction that is introduced to the customer purchasing experience had a negative impact on Y. Jon was aware of managing the client experience. The challenging module of the solution was the backend customer verification that underwent significant obstacles with the passing of the GDPR law that allowed any customer to request deletion of ...

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