Insider Quote: On EERs and Diplomatic Wunderkinds

“The Employee Evaluation Reports we spend so much time writing every year fail to give promotion panels a useful means for comparing officers to their peers. Raters and reviewers are not required to rank their subordinate officers, and almost never do. That leaves panel members almost wholly dependent upon the EER narratives, most of which describe the rated officers as diplomatic wunderkinds. And when everyone is advertised as a superstar, it is hard to differentiate between real achievers and mediocre performers. The result is promotions that are far more random than they should be.”

Jonathan Fritz
Economic Officer in Beijing; entered the Foreign Service in 1993
from EERs: The Forgotten Front in the War for Talent
Foreign Service Journal │June 2009