Business news • February 2023

Annual interview template for IT service companies: download a free template

Parce que nous savons que la trame d’entretien annuel est longue à préparer, BoondManager facilite votre quotidien. Annual interviews are an evaluation of your collaborators’ objectives and missions. It has for purpose to monitor their performances and to have an overview of the past year. This exercise needs to be prepared beforehand by the manager and the collaborator in order to be able, with a shared overview, to inspire energy and motivation. Preparation starts with the creation of an annual interview template.

Annual interviews are very important in IT service companies and consulting firms where employees spend the majority of their time in clients’ companies and might sometimes feel isolated.

For the manager, whose main job is to guide their team and to help the progress of their collaborators, the scope for action can be limited because of this distance relationship. It can be difficult for them to monitor projects, and to control the balance between the volume of work and allocated resources.

The Manager must plan a date for an interview in advance. This time is necessary for the collaborator to be able to prepare themselves and for the interview to be advantageous.

Annual interview: Collaborator’s side

This preparation firstly consists in recalling key events of the year: has the team workforce increased? Were projects more stimulating? Did processes change?

There should be, then, an overview on the achieved and unachieved goals, as well as a discussion on the reasons for successes and failures. When goals are exceeded, the question remaining is to know if it is due to an exceptional context or if it is the product of the company’s actions. What is the achievement of results attributed to? In cases of not achieving goals, while staying as fairly impartial as possible, the collaborator should think of reasons why these failures were met and, in some cases, assume responsibility for their part.

Before the interview, the collaborator should also elaborate an action plan or should have suggestions in order to improve their work for the upcoming year.
This overview of key events and achieved/unachieved goals is completed by a self-evaluation of the collaborator’s performance and skills. By showing as much lucidity as possible, the collaborator should question themselves on their main strengths and main weaknesses. This approach can emphasize the need to reassign missions or the need for particular training.

Finally, the collaborator will be able to think about their career’s future.

Annual interview: Manager’s side

Preparing the annual interview template

For preparation, the manager needs to ask themselves questions, similar to the collaborator in terms of key events and reaching goals.

For the evaluation of the collaborator’s skills, the manager should keep in mind that all appreciation needs to be justified by impartial elements and quantified. Here again, improvisation is definitely not recommended. A feeling or impression can not be enough to justify a negative evaluation of a collaborator.
The manager then determines the wished goals for the upcoming year.

The manager’s goal? For the collaborator to leave the interview with an unswerving motivation.
To succeed, everyone should be devoted to this exercise with the following key words in mind: “dialogue”, “listening” and “openminded”.

Beyond those key words, the success of this interview depends on the positive attitude of each party. Spoken words are as important as non-spoken words. Of course, some attitudes sometimes betray these spoken words.

“Facing” doesn’t mean “confronting”. An annual interview should not be an occasion to settle scores! It is further more constructive to focus on the way things can be improved.

When evaluating skills, the manager should make a particular effort to explain and justify their remarks. This allows the collaborator to ensure that the manager has an effective role and knows it well enough to monitor their work as they should. That’s how the manager’s evaluation can be credible. In some ways, the collaborator also evaluates their manager.

Fixing goals for the upcoming year is a crucial moment. A great goal needs to be shared and needs to be the object of a negotiation between the manager and the collaborator. This negotiation can be about means, about the level of results to be reached, temporality, the number of goals to reach, etc. The manager has every interest to accept and carry out this negotiation wisely. A negotiated goal has more chance to actually be accepted by the collaborator and eventually reached. The collaborator should take the opportunity to be a stakeholder in the decisions to fix goals.

The last step of the interview, geared towards the future, can significantly increase the collaborator’s motivation. In fact, by expressing their wishes for career development, the collaborator is about imagine a desired situation which constitutes in great driving force for their commitment. The manager will take time to attentively listen to the collaborator, to explore their demands, their vision. The ideal being they all correspond to possibilities to evolve within the company.