"The annual performance review objectively measures who performed and who didn't." Except the score often says more about the manager who gave it than the person who earned it.

In Lie No. 9 of Lies of HR, we take it apart: how recency, availability and affinity bias quietly distort every rating, why forced ranking and the bell curve are statistically invalid (real performance follows a power law, not a normal distribution), how Goodhart's law turns any review score into a target people game rather than a measure that works, and why automating the whole flawed process with AI just makes biased judgement faster and harder to challenge. Then the reframe: separate evaluation from development, make feedback continuous, and keep a human accountable for every call.

The voices are AI; the arguments come from Martin Spiteri Schillig's sixteen  ...