Want to Get Promoted as an Engineer at Personio? Here’s How
Why it Matters to Us
We all understand the importance of career growth for any professional, and how promotions play a key role in awarding and fostering that growth. Typically in a new job or role, the first goal is to get up to speed and start being productive. But what comes after that? How do you ensure you’re continually growing and preparing for your next step?
In many organizations, that path to promotion is unclear. You don’t know when a promotional assessment will happen or even what you’ll be assessed on. And if you don’t get the promotion, you may not get a satisfactory answer as to why.
At Personio, our core purpose is to enable better organizations, and part of that means holding ourselves to the highest standard when it comes to who and how we promote. We’re also competing for tech talent with some of the strongest engineering organizations in the world — and we want to win. That’s why we’ve built a promotion process that is as transparent, fair, and objective as possible.
The Process
The basic outline of our promotion process is actually quite simple:
- You and your manager work together to write down your achievements and impact, including examples and evidence, in a document called the “promotion package.” (More on that below.)
- Your manager submits the promotion package to the promotion committee, which meets every six months and is composed of your peers and other engineering managers.
- The committee analyses your case in detail. If they make a positive recommendation, you get promoted (congrats!). If not, you receive feedback on your promotion package and next steps to improve on any perceived gaps or growth areas.
Much of the promotion process is focused on trying to answer one question: Is there concrete evidence that you have already been performing at the level you want to be promoted to? While we don’t expect you to perform perfectly in every aspect of a new role immediately after being promoted into it, we do want to ensure you’re set up for success as you step into it.
The Criteria
So how does the promotion committee evaluate your promotion package? Because we’ve created this process to be as objective as possible, each individual’s case is measured against the same set of criteria for each role, which is available to every member of the team. Each job level that we have at Personio is clearly lined out in our Career Path document, and the requirements for each level are defined in our Role Expectations & Responsibilities and Role Evaluation docs.
Role Expectations and Responsibilities
This document describes the “what” of a role, including the daily work and concrete responsibilities. It summarizes a whole role (Backend Engineer, SRE, etc.) but does not cover the differences between levels, like what sets a senior engineer apart from a junior.
Role Evaluation
The Role Evaluation doc does describe those levels, defining the different expectations between each one in detail. This includes the behavior, impact, and outcomes required for each level, and, naturally, these get more demanding and ambitious with each level increase.
For example, the expectation for junior developers might include “Is able to implement most small features and bug fixes independently.” A staff engineer, on the other hand, would be expected to “advocate for building robust and reliable customer-oriented solutions. Is focused on solving problems and achieving high impact in a pragmatic and nondogmatic way.”
The Promotion Package
As mentioned above, the promotion package is a document that contains all the information the committee needs to make an informed decision, including evidence that shows you’ve been performing at the next level. The amount and nature of the content varies by level, but it always contains these elements:
Impact Record
The Impact Record describes your work contributions and the effect you and your work has had on the people, processes, or technology. It answers the question, “What changed as a result of your contribution?”
Examples you could include in this document are numerous: a metric or KPI you helped improve; a cost savings; a performance improvement; a manual task you automated; a risk identified and averted; compliance assured; a project delivered for another team; barriers removed; a customer request satisfied; a sale secured; a colleague onboarded; or a new hire finalized. You get the idea.
These impact statements are supported by independent evidence that the committee can review, including documentation and code. “Documentation” covers a wide range of evidence, from articles or internal documentation you’ve written in the form of READMEs and Wiki articles to presentations, design documents (we distinguish between internal RFCs and Architecture Decision Records), and protocols from working groups.
Your code examples might include exemplary code that you have written in the form of individual Merge Requests, or the technical excellence of a repository that shows how you’ve pushed our technical standards higher. Your comments on other people’s Merge Requests can also illustrate how you contribute to the codebase. Your demonstrated influence on other people’s code can count as well — if you improved your process and convinced others to follow your path, all the better!
Manager Evaluation
Your manager adds an evaluation in support of your promotion. The evaluation includes descriptions of your impactful work, but can also cover your positive, less-quantifiable characteristics and behaviour. For example, they could write about times you have mentored and coached your peers, lead meetings, or helped make influential decisions.
Peer Feedback
We also ask your peers for feedback on working with you and if they agree that you should be promoted. If yes or no, then why or why not? This feedback reflection is different from our standard feedback rounds, as it focuses on a longer timeframe and specifically asks questions around promotion.
Make it Work for You
Even if you don’t work for Personio (yet), our promotion package framework can be a powerful tool for your career. It helps decision-makers to move beyond their subjective opinions to an objective, evidence-based discussion. We suggest continually collecting evidence as it comes up — this excellent article outlining the brag document is a great place to start.
Interested in learning more? Then stay tuned for a future article where I’ll discuss how we run the promotion committee in detail.
If you like this process and want to grow to the next level by joining us, we have a variety of open roles! Check them out on our careers page here. And if you’re happy where you are at the moment, feel free to leave your thoughts about our process in the comments!
