There's a version of you that shows up when you know you're being evaluated, and a version that shows up when you're actually doing the work. They're not the same person.
Research on choking under pressure (Beilock, 2005) explains why. Pressure doesn't just make people nervous. It actively consumes working memory, the same cognitive resources that deep thinkers rely on most. The people with the highest cognitive capacity are the ones who choke the hardest under evaluation, because they have the most to lose when pressure eats into their bandwidth. The thing that makes someone good at their job can be the thing that breaks during the interview for it.
Now, practice helps. A lot. Repeated exposure to evaluation conditions builds familiarity, reduces anxiety, and trains you to perform despite the pressure. Nobody gets to skip evaluations, the world runs on them, and preparing for them is a real and necessary skill. Consulting case interviews are a good example. They're testing something the role genuinely demands: structured thinking on your feet, under pressure, in front of clients. That's the actual job. McKinsey pairing the case with a Personal Experience Interview at roughly equal weight reflects that consulting needs both analytical depth and composure under pressure. The preparation industry exists because practice works, and the format exists because the role requires exactly that kind of on-the-spot thinking.
So evaluations are necessary, practice narrows the gap, and well-designed evaluations test things that matter.
And yet.
A study on 858 workers at an Italian bank found that absenteeism more than doubled the moment their probation period ended. These were people who had already passed the evaluation, already proven themselves, already secured the role. The common reading is that people slack off once they're safe. The more interesting reading is that evaluation mode is its own cognitive state, one that requires sustained effort to maintain and naturally can't last once the pressure lifts. People during probation aren't showing you their default. They're showing you what they can sustain when the stakes are high. Those are different things.
This is the part that sits with me. Evaluations work. Practice works. Good design helps. And underneath all of that, there's still a measurable, systematic gap between how people perform when they know they're being watched and how they perform when they're just doing the work. For some people, that gap is small. For others, especially the ones whose strength is deep, slower-burn thinking, it can be significant.
Probably worth keeping in mind, on both sides of the evaluation table.
Research on choking under pressure (Beilock, 2005) explains why. Pressure doesn't just make people nervous. It actively consumes working memory, the same cognitive resources that deep thinkers rely on most. The people with the highest cognitive capacity are the ones who choke the hardest under evaluation, because they have the most to lose when pressure eats into their bandwidth. The thing that makes someone good at their job can be the thing that breaks during the interview for it.
Now, practice helps. A lot. Repeated exposure to evaluation conditions builds familiarity, reduces anxiety, and trains you to perform despite the pressure. Nobody gets to skip evaluations, the world runs on them, and preparing for them is a real and necessary skill. Consulting case interviews are a good example. They're testing something the role genuinely demands: structured thinking on your feet, under pressure, in front of clients. That's the actual job. McKinsey pairing the case with a Personal Experience Interview at roughly equal weight reflects that consulting needs both analytical depth and composure under pressure. The preparation industry exists because practice works, and the format exists because the role requires exactly that kind of on-the-spot thinking.
So evaluations are necessary, practice narrows the gap, and well-designed evaluations test things that matter.
And yet.
A study on 858 workers at an Italian bank found that absenteeism more than doubled the moment their probation period ended. These were people who had already passed the evaluation, already proven themselves, already secured the role. The common reading is that people slack off once they're safe. The more interesting reading is that evaluation mode is its own cognitive state, one that requires sustained effort to maintain and naturally can't last once the pressure lifts. People during probation aren't showing you their default. They're showing you what they can sustain when the stakes are high. Those are different things.
This is the part that sits with me. Evaluations work. Practice works. Good design helps. And underneath all of that, there's still a measurable, systematic gap between how people perform when they know they're being watched and how they perform when they're just doing the work. For some people, that gap is small. For others, especially the ones whose strength is deep, slower-burn thinking, it can be significant.
Probably worth keeping in mind, on both sides of the evaluation table.