# 90 Day Performance Review Examples - and How to Prepare for Yours Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/90-day-performance-review-examples/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/90-day-performance-review-examples.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving working with your manager at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Most 90 day performance review examples are manager templates. Here is what yours will actually cover, plus a seven-step way to prepare for the meeting. ## Key facts - Title: 90 Day Performance Review Examples - and How to Prepare for Yours - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Influence - Primary keyword: 90 day performance review examples - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/90-day-performance-review-examples/ ## What this page covers - Most 90 day performance review examples are manager templates. Here is what yours will actually cover, plus a seven-step way to prepare for the meeting. - Practical guidance for 90 day performance review examples - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation Most 90 day performance review examples you find online are manager templates: a form with sections for strengths, areas for improvement, and goals for the next quarter. That is genuinely useful, though not as wording to borrow. Read one as a preview of the document your own manager is about to fill in about you. Three months in, that document can feel like a verdict you have no part in writing. It isn't. The examples are more useful read backwards, as a list of what your manager will be looking for evidence of, and what you can walk in already holding. ## What a 90 day performance review actually covers The templates are remarkably consistent. According to AIHR's 90-day review guide, a complete review covers strengths, areas for improvement, and goal-setting, and confirms that a new hire's work lines up with team and company expectations. Indeed's manager template adds the usual output shape: one or two development areas with specific suggestions, plus two or three [goals for the coming quarter](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/goals-for-performance-review/). Deel, Eddy, Leapsome and Primalogik all publish variations on the same form. If you have been wondering what will be on the page, this is it. There are very few surprises in the structure. The instruction that should interest you most is the one written for your manager rather than for you. AIHR and Leapsome both tell reviewers to anchor every rating and comment to a specific behavior, outcome, or example from the first 90 days, and to keep competency comments separate from personality judgments. That is a sound rule, and it carries a consequence nobody spells out: your manager can only write about the work they actually saw. Three months is short. Solid work that happened quietly, or on a project someone else presented, may simply not reach the page. It is also, for most people, the first real feedback of the job. HR guides such as AIHR's note that 30- and 60-day check-ins usually come too soon to evaluate performance properly, which makes the 90-day conversation the first time anyone gives you an honest read on how you work. That is worth knowing in advance, because the first critical sentence you hear about your own work tends to land harder than it was meant to. One thing the templates do not settle is what the review decides. Sources describe it as the point that closes onboarding and confirms alignment rather than a fixed pass-or-fail gate, and Indeed's career-advice guide notes that some organizations raise productivity expectations after a strong first 90 days. What it means at your employer is a fair question to ask outright. If the "areas for improvement" box is the part you are quietly bracing for, it costs little to get a sense of [where your work habits stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) beforehand, so that whatever your manager names is something you have already thought about rather than something that catches you flat. ## How to prepare for your 90 day performance review ### 1. Ask what form the review will take Start here, roughly two weeks out, because everything else depends on the answer. Some employers run the review off a written template you will see, some ask you to complete a self-assessment first, and some keep it to a conversation. Ask your manager or HR which it is, whether you are expected to submit anything in writing, and how long the meeting will be. It is a plain administrative question, and asking it reads as preparation rather than nerves. ### 2. Reread the expectations you were given on day one Before you assess yourself against anything, go back to what you were actually asked to do. Indeed's guidance for employees is to review the expectations set when you started and note where you clearly met them and where you did not. Revisit the original job description too, and compare it with the work you have really been doing. The two drift apart quickly in a new role, and where they have drifted is a legitimate discussion point, not a failure. ### 3. Write your own assessment before you read anyone else's Now write down, honestly, what you are proud of from the first three months, what has been difficult, and where you can see yourself improving. Do this before you look at more example wording, or you will end up describing a generic employee instead of yourself. Twenty minutes and a blank page is enough. If your employer asks for [a formal self-assessment](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-assessment-performance-review/), this draft becomes it. If not, it becomes your notes for the meeting. ### 4. Attach evidence to each thing you claim This is the step that changes the meeting, and it follows directly from the rule your manager is working to. Go through your own assessment line by line and attach something specific to each point: the task, roughly when it happened, the outcome, who else was involved. "I cleared the intake backlog in November" is far more usable to someone writing a review than "I am organized." You are not building a case for yourself. You are supplying the concrete examples your manager needs in order to write anything favorable at all. ### 5. Decide what you want to ask for Reviews are two-way on the template and often one-way in practice, and the difference is usually whether the employee arrives with anything to raise. Guidance from Effy and Connecteam points at the same short list: the support or resources you need, the parts of the role that are still unclear, and the questions that have piled up since you started. Pick two or three. Leaving with a clearer sense of [what you can decide on your own](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/how-to-align-expectations-with-your-manager/), and where you should still be checking first, is one of the more valuable outcomes available here. ### 6. In the meeting, listen first and respond second When the feedback comes, the instinct is to explain. Hold that for a moment. Take in what your manager is actually saying, ask a question if a point is unclear, and only then add your own view of the same situation. Take notes while they talk. Nearly all [constructive feedback](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-receive-feedback/) in a 90-day review is a description of how to do the job better here, not a judgment about whether you belong, but you have to hear it properly before you can use it. ### 7. Leave with written goals and a next check-in The forward-looking half of the review is the half you can most influence. Expect to agree on one or two development areas and two or three goals for the coming quarter, and make sure you leave with those written down in the words you both used, not your reconstruction of them a week later. Ask what good looks like at six months, whether expectations change now that onboarding is over, and when you will next sit down together. A goal with no date attached quietly stops existing. ## The skills that decide how this conversation goes Read back through those steps and the pattern is not really about review forms at all. Almost every one of them is a small act of managing an ongoing working relationship, before and after the hour you spend in the meeting. **Working with Your Manager** does most of the work here. It covers the practical side of a review: preparing properly, influencing your own evaluation rather than receiving it passively, keeping the conversation future-focused, and asking for what you actually want. It also covers the habits that make the next review easier, like meeting regularly, making your results visible, and agreeing on what you are free to decide alone. Most of a good 90-day review is built in the weeks before it. **Building Self-Awareness** is what lets you use the feedback instead of flinching from it. There is a workable order for receiving it: understand what is being said, then add your own view, then reflect on it afterward, rather than attempting all three at once and out loud. The same skill sits behind an honest self-assessment. Naming what you are genuinely good at, as opposed to merely competent at, is harder than it sounds and more useful in a review than modesty. **Influence** explains why two people who did comparable work can come out of a review differently. A reputation is built by delivering consistently and being known for something specific, helped along by initiative: offering to write the summary, raising the thing nobody has raised, following through after you said you would. None of that is self-promotion. It is making real work visible to someone who cannot be everywhere at once. Preparation time is limited, so it helps to know where to spend it. Checking [which of yours are strongest](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), across the full set of twelve work skills this conversation draws on rather than just these three, narrows that down quickly. Each of them is a habit you can build, not a trait you either have or don't. ## You have more say in this than the form suggests Some of this may already match how you work. Reading up on a review three months into a job is itself the behavior the review rewards, and it puts you ahead of the version of yourself who would have thought about it for ten minutes in the corridor beforehand. Whatever gaps are left are not fixed points. They are the parts you have not learned yet, and they move with practice rather than with personality. They also count for more over time. A 90-day review is a small version of a conversation you will have every year for the rest of your working life, with higher stakes each time and less allowance made for being new. Getting comfortable with it now, while the expectations are still gentle, is worth considerably more than getting through this particular one. ## See where your own work skills stand The last piece is knowing what you are working with. The **free** Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment that shows you where you stand across all twelve of these work skills, including the ones behind preparing for a review, taking feedback well, and making your contribution visible, and which of them would make the biggest difference to you right now. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Most 90 day performance review examples are manager templates. Here is what yours will actually cover, plus a seven-step way to prepare for the meeting. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Influence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/90-day-performance-review-examples/ Preferred summary: "Most 90 day performance review examples are manager templates. Here is what yours will actually cover, plus a seven-step way to prepare for the meeting." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.