Thoughts on building a better feedback culture

You were qualified. The interviews felt good. The rejection email says they went with a candidate whose experience "more closely matches the role," which is strange, because you…

Final round went well. The email arrives: "Please send three references we can contact." You scroll your phone for the three people alive most likely to say lovely things about…

The review form is open. First question: "List your key accomplishments for this period." The cursor blinks. You worked hard all year, you know you did, and right now you can name…

A hiring manager posted recently that he received 84 applications in four days for one customer support role. There was no realistic way to phone screen them all, so he bought an…

You are good at your job. Maybe too good. You have been carrying more than your title says for a while now, the messy cross-team work, the decisions nobody else wants to own, the…

You got laid off, and now a job you actually want is asking for references. The dread is immediate. The manager who could vouch for you is gone, scattered with everyone else when…

You read your review and the number was lower than the year felt. Not terrible. "Successful," not "exceptional." A few lines of summary that skated over the parts you were…

You opened your performance review expecting something, anything, that sounded like it was about you. Instead you got three paragraphs of smooth, agreeable, weightless text.…

You watched it happen. Someone you out-work, maybe someone whose work you have quietly cleaned up more than once, walked away with the title you wanted. And the hardest part is…

You left on good terms. Cards, a leaving lunch, real warmth. Your manager told you more than once that you were one of the best on the team. So when a new employer asked for a…

Years ago I rebuilt a competitor's valuation model in under thirty minutes. A client had been handed the spreadsheet with the formulas stripped out, just pasted values, so they…

You just found a job you actually want, and then the thought arrives: my last manager is going to bury me. Maybe you left on bad terms. Maybe they were the reason you left. Either…

You did the work. The results are real. And somewhere along the way you realized the thing nobody writes in the employee handbook: your career is not evaluated by a system. It is…

Most performance reviews, and most performance scores, are decided by one person or a group of people. Your superiors. Who are set for life and sometimes just want to keep you…

We built VOILA because we were tired of a broken system, where merit often does not matter. Today, I want to show you exactly how VOILA works. How does VOILA work? A 2-minute…

I built VOILA because workplace feedback is broken. Here's what happened: My manager once told me to study our client's financial models to "learn different modeling approaches."…