Want a structured, private way to gather promotion recommendations during performance reviews? Adding a confidential question for managers helps your organization identify promotion-ready employees without adding extra processes.
This approach lets you capture a consistent signal from managers while keeping responses visible only to those who need to know, like HR and leadership. It’s especially useful for supporting calibration, compensation decisions, and long-term talent planning.
How it works
You’ll add a confidential multiple-choice question to your review template, typically worded like:
“Are you recommending [employee name] for a promotion?”
Managers answer Yes or No, and their response is only visible to:
Themselves (the Reviewer)
Their management chain
HR Admins
This setup helps leadership and HR teams gather a consistent signal across teams without exposing responses to the employee or peers.
Tip: You can enable a comment field so managers can share additional context behind their recommendation. This can be especially useful during calibration or follow-up conversations.
Setting it up
Go to Reviews and open the cycle or template you want to edit.
Add a multiple-choice question to the Manager Assessment section.
Enter your promotion prompt (e.g. “Are you recommending [employee name] for a promotion?”).
Set the visibility to Confidential.
Define the answer options (typically Yes and No).
(Optional) Enable the comment field if you'd like managers to share context
Save your changes.
Tip: Keep the wording simple and consistent across cycles to support easier tracking over time.
Viewing the results
Responses to confidential questions are included in the Review Exports, making it easy to compile promotion recommendations for:
Calibration sessions
Talent planning
Compensation discussions
Note: These responses are not visible to employees or other Reviewers. They’re strictly limited to the manager, their management chain, and HR.
Optional: Using confidential questions in 360 Feedback
While performance reviews are the most common place to collect promotion recommendations, some organizations also use confidential questions in 360 Feedback cycles.
In this setup, peers can share promotion-related input through a confidential question, with responses visible only to the manager, their management chain, and HR. This can be useful if you want additional perspective alongside manager recommendations.
That said, performance reviews are typically the primary place where promotion decisions are documented and reviewed, with 360 feedback used as supporting context rather than a replacement.