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If you’ve ever walked out of a performance review thinking, “Did I really capture their whole year… or just the last few weeks?” — you’re not alone.
Recency bias is one of those sneaky traps that even experienced managers fall into. It quietly shifts your focus to what just happened and blurs everything that came before. One missed deadline in November suddenly feels bigger than six months of rock-solid performance.
Among companies that run performance reviews, only about a third still stick with annual cycles — and recency bias is a big reason why. It turns what should be balanced, thoughtful evaluations into “what have you done for me lately?” conversations.
But here’s the good news: once you know how recency bias shows up, you can design your performance reviews to work with your brain instead of against it. That’s how you move from rushed, memory-based judgments to confident, fair evaluations your team can actually trust.
In this blog, you’ll learn what recency bias is, how it shows up in performance reviews, and practical ways to prevent it from skewing your evaluations.
What Is Recency Bias?
Think of your brain as a spotlight. It doesn’t shine evenly on everything — it favors what’s closest.
Recency bias is your mind’s tendency to give more weight to recent information than older data, regardless of which is actually more important. It’s a mental shortcut that helps you deal with overload, but it also means your decisions can get skewed without you realizing it.
Recent events sit in your short-term memory, so they feel sharper, clearer, and more emotionally charged. Older wins and struggles don’t disappear they just get filed deeper away, where they’re harder to pull up in the moment. When you’re under pressure to finish reviews, your brain grabs whatever is easiest to access: the latest chapter, not the whole story.
Examples of Recency Bias
Once you start noticing recency bias, you’ll see it everywhere — not just in performance reviews.
- In investment decisions, an investor panics and sells a strong stock after a bad week, ignoring five years of steady gains.
- In hiring, the candidate interviewed on Friday feels “better” simply because they’re fresher in memory than the one from Tuesday.
- In sports, a quarterback throws three interceptions in the final game and suddenly gets labeled “unreliable,” despite an otherwise strong season.
- In customer behavior, a single bad support interaction triggers a harsh review, wiping out years of positive experiences in the person’s mind.
In the workplace, the impact can be even more painful. Nine months of excellent work can get overshadowed by one rough project near review time. That doesn’t just feel unfair — it can quietly erode motivation, trust, and engagement.
What Is Recency Bias in Performance Reviews?
Let’s put this into a familiar scenario.
Sarah has an incredible first half of the year. She closes three major deals, mentors two new hires, and leads a successful product launch. Then November hits. She struggles with a demanding client and misses a couple of deadlines.
When review season rolls around, what comes to mind first for her manager? Those November struggles. The big wins from March and June feel distant and hazy by comparison.
That’s recency bias in performance reviews: recent performance is front and center, and earlier contributions fade into the background. It doesn’t mean the manager doesn’t care or isn’t trying to be fair — it just means they’re relying on a brain that’s wired to prioritize what happened last.
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How Recency Bias Shows Up in the Workplace
In performance reviews, recency bias can quietly turn even thoughtful managers into short-term thinkers.
Take Jamie. She lands a massive deal early in the year, takes on extra responsibilities, and helps stabilize a key account. Then she has a tough Q4 — a few missteps, a difficult project, a couple of missed targets. If her manager is preparing reviews under pressure, those recent missteps may drown out the earlier wins.
This doesn’t happen because managers are careless. It happens because reviews are often rushed, emotional, and loaded with expectations. Under that kind of pressure, your brain leans heavily on what’s vivid and current. The problem is that performance reviews aren’t supposed to be quick, gut-feel decisions — they’re meant to reflect a full year of effort, growth, and outcomes.
Why This Matters for Your Evaluations
When recency bias takes over, people don’t get evaluated on their true contribution — they get evaluated on their timing.
A single recent mistake can overshadow a year of strong performance. On the flip side, an underperformer can sometimes “game the system” by sprinting in the last few weeks before review season and masking a year of inconsistency.
The result?
- High performers feel unseen and undervalued.
- Struggling employees don’t get the support they actually need.
- Your team starts to doubt whether reviews are really fair.
And once people stop trusting the process, they stop engaging with it. That’s the moment reviews become a checkbox exercise instead of a real driver of growth and development.
Recency Bias vs Primacy Bias
Recency bias isn’t the only memory trap in performance reviews — primacy bias is its counterpart.
- Recency bias zooms in on what happened recently (“What have you done for me lately?”).
- Primacy bias locks onto first impressions (“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”).
With primacy bias, a manager’s early opinion of someone — “She’s a star,” or “He’s difficult” — can subtly color everything that comes afterward. Even when the employee’s performance changes, that first impression still holds too much power.
Both biases pull your evaluations away from reality. Naming them makes it easier to spot when they may be creeping into your judgments and gives you a chance to pause, check your assumptions, and look back at the full year instead of one moment in time.
What Causes Recency Bias During Evaluations?
Your brain isn’t trying to sabotage fair performance reviews — it’s doing exactly what it was built to do. Understanding what’s going on under the hood makes it much easier to design better habits and systems.
1. Short-Term Memory and the Recency Effect
During review season, your short-term memory becomes the main stage. It can only hold so much at once, so whatever happened most recently naturally rises to the top. Psychologists call this the recency effect — the tendency to remember the last items in a sequence more clearly than the ones in the middle.
When you sit down to write reviews without notes, your mind reaches for what’s closest: last month’s project, last week’s mistake, yesterday’s win. That incredible client save from February? It’s still there, but it’s buried under many layers of newer experiences.
2. Cognitive Overload in Annual Reviews
Annual performance reviews almost guarantee cognitive overload. You’re trying to recall a year’s worth of:
- Results and metrics
- Strengths and development areas
- Goals, blockers, and stretch moments
At the same time, your emotional brain is very much online — especially if you’re anticipating difficult conversations. Under that load, your brain simplifies. It grabs onto what’s easiest to remember, which is usually what’s newest, most emotional, or most stressful.
3. Lack of Structured Documentation
When you don’t have structured documentation, you are essentially asking your memory to act as your performance management system. That’s a lot to ask.
Without notes, small dips in performance near review time can feel like the whole story. Breakthroughs and quiet, consistent excellence from earlier in the year fade into the background. Documentation isn’t about bureaucracy; it’s about making sure people get credit for their full contribution, not just the last chapter.
How to Reduce Recency Bias as a Manager
The goal isn’t to become a perfectly unbiased evaluator — that’s not realistic. The goal is to build systems and habits that keep your brain honest, even when you’re busy or stressed.
1. Set and Track Long-Term Goals
Clear, long-term SMART goals are your anchor during review season. When you define success upfront — with specific, measurable outcomes across the year it becomes much harder for one recent setback to outweigh months of progress.
If Jamie’s goal is to “increase client retention by 15% over the year,” her Q4 slump doesn’t erase the steady gains she made in Q1, Q2, and Q3. The goal itself forces you to look at the full timeline.
2. Use Performance Management Tools
Performance management tools act as your “backup brain.” They capture achievements, feedback, and progress throughout the year instead of leaving everything to your memory.
When you sit down to write a performance review and can scroll through months of goals, feedback, and recognition, recency bias loses a lot of its power. You’re no longer guessing — you’re reviewing evidence.
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3. Encourage Regular Feedback Logging
Make it normal, even expected — to log feedback throughout the year. After a big project, a client meeting, a presentation, or a coaching conversation, capture a quick note. It doesn’t need to be perfect; it just needs to be timely and specific.
You can also encourage employees to keep their own “wins file” or performance journal. When review time comes, those notes become a shared source of truth instead of relying only on what you both can remember.
4. Conduct More Frequent Check-Ins
Annual reviews alone are a perfect storm for recency bias. More frequent one-on-ones and mid-year check-ins spread the weight of evaluation across the year.
These conversations create natural touchpoints to:
- Revisit goals
- Discuss progress and blockers
- Capture recent wins and lessons
By the time you reach the formal review, you’re not reconstructing the year from scratch — you’re connecting the dots on conversations you’ve already been having.
5. Include Peer and 360-Degree Feedback
Your perspective as a manager is important, but it’s just one angle. Peer input and 360-degree feedback help fill in the gaps, especially for day-to-day behaviors you may not see.
When you ask reviewers to reflect on the full period (for example, the last 6–12 months) rather than “How have they been recently?”, you nudge them away from recency bias too.
6. Standardize Evaluation Criteria
Standardized evaluation criteria and clear rating scales help you evaluate everyone using the same yardstick. That structure reduces the risk that your impression of the “recent version” of someone outweighs their full track record.
Calibration sessions — where leaders compare and discuss ratings — add another layer of protection. They force you to explain your reasoning and, often, to revisit parts of the year you hadn’t fully considered.
How Do You Avoid Recency Bias as a Manager?
If there’s one practical mindset shift that makes a huge difference, it’s this: don’t trust your memory alone.
Start with a simple habit: jot down short notes after important moments. Project wrap-ups, tough client calls, coaching conversations, stretch assignments — capture what happened, how the employee handled it, and what stood out to you. This can take two minutes, but it gives you priceless context later.
Consider keeping a lightweight “performance journal” for each team member. It doesn’t need to be formal — even a recurring calendar reminder to record a few bullets can help. When Sarah solves a messy client issue in March or David steps up during Q2, write it down. Those notes become your protection against recency bias in performance reviews.
Another powerful technique is to break the evaluation period into chunks — months or quarters — and assess each one before forming your overall judgment. This forces you to look at the full arc of performance instead of just the final chapter.
Finally, before you finalize any review, pause and ask:
“Am I giving proper weight to what happened earlier this year?”
If the answer is “I’m not sure,” that’s your cue to go back to your notes, feedback, and goals and rebalance the picture.
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Final Thoughts
Finally, before you finalize any review, pause and ask: "Am I giving proper weight to what happened earlier this year?" If the answer is "I'm not sure," that's your cue to go back to your notes, feedback, and goals and rebalance the picture.
If you want a system that does this for you automatically, ThrivesSparrow is worth a serious look — your team's performance record builds itself throughout the year, so you're always review-ready.
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FAQs About Recency Bias in Reviews
Q1. How does recency bias affect performance reviews?
Recency bias causes managers to overemphasize recent performance and overlook achievements and challenges from earlier in the evaluation period. That can lead to reviews that feel misaligned with the employee’s actual year.
Q2. What are some effective strategies to combat recency bias in evaluations?
Consistent documentation, regular check-ins, clear long-term goals, performance management tools, and 360-degree feedback all help ensure you’re looking at the full year, not just the latest few weeks.
Q3. Can recency bias be completely eliminated from performance reviews?
Probably not — it’s tied to how human memory works. But with structured frameworks, clear rating scales, and better habits, you can significantly reduce its impact.
Q4. How does recency bias differ from other types of bias in performance appraisals?
Recency bias is about when something happened — it favors recent events. Other biases, like the halo effect or personal bias, affect how you interpret someone’s performance overall. Primacy bias, in contrast, gives too much power to first impressions.
Q5. Why is it important for managers to address recency bias in their evaluations?
Because fair, accurate reviews are the foundation for trust, growth, and good decisions about promotions, pay, and development. When people know you’ve considered their entire contribution, they’re far more likely to engage with feedback and stay motivated.
