Assessment Sheet as a Basis

... are important and essential for creating an appreciative and informative qualified employment reference:

1. A manager taking time for the assessment of their employee.
2. An equally functional and target-aimed assessment sheet that is easy and quick to handle.
3. An expert with the know-how of writing a qualified employment reference.

On this page, we would like to examine the second point further – the assessment sheet.

The assessment sheet has many names (reference checklist, evaluation tool, reference preparation etc.) and is a detailed, standardized form for the evaluation of your employee. The overall aim here is to enable the superior undertaking the evaluation to assess their employee in an objective, comparable and transparent way, as possible, by means of the assessment sheet, resulting in a largely complete picture of the job, the person, their performance and their behavior.

Based on our work as a reference agency of more than 15 years, we have developed an assessment sheet which ensures the creation of an individual employment reference. The information provided by the superior gives us a personal profile which we translate into the corresponding wording in the reference language.

The superior’s overall impression of their employee is passed on to us by means of his individually differentiated and profiling evaluation. This enables us to visualize to employee’s personality at their job.

The more detailed and intensive the evaluation by the superior in the assessment sheet, the more expressive the employment reference will be and the more worth a read it will be for the eventual reader.

In 1530, certificates for proper separation („Atteste für ordnungsgemäßes Ausscheiden“) were introduced. Without such a certificate, a domestic worker was not able to find new employment.

In 1846 Prussia, a so-called servant logbook („Gesindedienstbuch“) was in use. It held evaluations of the criteria diligence, loyalty, obedience, moral conduct and honesty, which are still known as “Prussian virtues” („Preußische Tugenden”) today.

 Today, we evaluate the employee in their job on the basis of the following criteria:

1. The willingness to work
   nowadays seems to be one of the most important criteria in differentiating between top performers, good employees and malperformers.
2. The ability to work
   is subdivided into statements about soft skills on the one hand and about resilience and endurance on the other.
3. Professional knowledge
   has not been solely conforming to the old rule “We do not learn for school, we learn for life“ for a long time – today, alongside the evaluation of the professional know-how,
4. the willingness for further training and the success of measures of further training
   have priority.
5. The working methods
   are no longer evaluated by Prussian measures, but on the basis of the specific requirements of the respective position.
6. The success
   is evaluated less and less in general terms, but rather differentiated with respect to
7. quality of work
   and
8. criteria of quantity
   such as speed and amount of work. In the past decades, the criterion
9. realization of objectives
   has particularly been focused upon. Alongside the willingness to work (see above), this seems an equally crucial criterion, which distinguishes top performers from good employees and malperformers.
10. The (internal and external) behavior
    is of interest to every reference reader. At this point, too, differentiated statements about the behavior within the company and towards external contacts, as well as about
11. general behavioral features
    such as the capacity for teamwork, persuasiveness, assertiveness, loyalty, integrity, etc. should be made.
12. The individual characteristics,
    which particularly distinguish the respective employee contribute significantly to enabling the eventual reader to get an idea about the employee. They can be personal achievements and successes or outstanding personal strengths. The recruiter is interested in the footprints the applicant has left in their earlier places of employment. They should be able to find those at this exposed passage, namely right before the
13. summary of the assessment.
    This will often be the first sentence the recruiter reads in any employment reference.
14. The closing paragraph,
    the “final chord“, should round off the overall impression of the employment reference, just as in a musical piece.

The excerpts given on this page will give you an impression of how our assessment sheet is structured. Upon request, we will gladly provide you with the full assessment sheet – in German and/or in English, depending on your requirements.