Largely yes, with one caveat. Scheduling and monitoring the annual cycle of performance and appraisal interviews is a task with fixed dates, a fixed number of employees and a clear outcome per step: interview scheduled, held, report recorded. That is exactly the kind of work systems are good at. The content of the interviews and the assessment itself remain human work; this is about the organization around it.
The task scores high on structuredness: an appraisal cycle has a fixed setup that recurs every year. Start date, deadline for the first interview, deadline for the final interview, reminders to managers who are behind schedule. That is a process with fixed steps and fixed moments, not an open question that needs to be answered differently case by case.
Volume matters too. At a company with a hundred employees, this means a hundred scheduled interviews, a hundred reminders, a hundred instances of tracking whether the report has come in. For an HR manager, that is a recurring administrative burden; for a system, it is a matter of linking data from the HR system to a calendar and sending a series of automatic signals. The larger the company, the heavier this advantage weighs.
The error costs of a missed step are limited and recoverable. An interview scheduled a week late is annoying but not a major risk. That makes it reasonable to leave this to a system: a mistake costs time, not reputation or money.
The technology that fits here is RPA: software that moves data and triggers actions according to fixed rules. Not a language model that makes judgments, but a system that, based on cycle data and the workforce in the HR system, automatically creates calendar invitations, monitors deadlines and escalates to the manager or HR if a step is not completed. This works as long as two preconditions are met: fixed cycle dates that are not renegotiated manually every year, and a link with the HR system where functions, teams and managers are kept up to date. If that link is missing, or if the cycle changes shape every year, a large part of the advantage disappears and it remains manual work after all.
Judgment and creativity score moderately, and that lies not in the scheduling but in the exceptions. An employee on long-term leave, a newly started employee who has not yet been employed for a year, a manager with a team of thirty people who wants to spread out the cycle: that requires a decision that a system should not make on its own. Compliance also plays a role, because appraisal reports can be relevant in labor law disputes; anyone who attaches consequences to this for an individual employee does so under the legal requirements that apply to personnel decisions, not on the basis of a scheduling tool.
The customer contact and physical axes are not relevant here; this is an internal process without a customer and without any physical action. That explains why the score on those axes is high, but it adds little to the assessment: the deciding factors are structuredness, volume and error costs, and all three point toward a system taking over the scheduling and monitoring work.
At an organization with an informal culture, where appraisal interviews take place outside a fixed cycle and managers themselves determine when it suits them, there is no fixed pattern to automate. In that case, this again comes down to something an HR manager coordinates per team, with all the unpredictability that entails. A company without a central HR system, where personnel data is kept in separate spreadsheets, also lacks the link needed to make this work. Conversely: at an organization with multiple locations and a large number of employees, the time savings become greater, simply because the manual work without automation grows proportionally with the number of people.
This task does not stand on its own. The outcomes of an appraisal cycle often feed into management reporting for the board or shareholders, and its scheduling is usually discussed in management meetings that need to be prepared and put on the agenda. It also touches on tracking leave balances, because absence directly affects when an interview can reasonably be scheduled. Those working in the wholesale sector will find a broader overview in what AI can take over in the wholesale sector.
This page provides an estimate based on a generic profile. How this plays out exactly depends on the organization's own HR systems, the fixed or variable setup of the cycle and the size of the workforce. Those who want to see this for their own organization can fill in the free quickscan: twelve questions, no account required, resulting in an indication of what portion of the hours in this kind of work can be taken over by AI today. The full work scan, which breaks down the work of an entire company into tasks, is still under construction.
Vraag maar. Ik ken de kennisbank van deze site; wat ik niet weet, zeg ik erbij.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.