The surest way to kill a review programme or a levelling framework is to start from a blank screen. Somebody has to define what "Communication" means and how it differs from "Influence", write out what the bottom of the scale looks like and what the top looks like, then do the same twenty more times. That isn't a week of writing, it's two months of circulating drafts, and a lot of companies stop right there.
The library removes that barrier specifically. The portal ships with ready wording — not as a standard you must adopt, but as a draft that is reliably better than an empty field.
The competency library
31 competencies for 360 reviews: communication, collaboration, ownership and accountability, results orientation, problem solving, decision making, adaptability, initiative, quality of work, attention to detail, time management, prioritization, learning and growth, giving and receiving feedback, leadership, mentoring, strategic thinking, business acumen, customer focus, innovation, critical thinking, conflict resolution, stakeholder management, project management, technical expertise, process improvement, resilience under pressure, cross-functional collaboration, influence and persuasion, execution speed, documentation and knowledge sharing.
Each one carries a description of what it measures plus two scale anchors: what the lowest score looks like in practice, and what the highest one looks like. The anchors matter more than the names — they're what makes a 3 from one manager mean roughly the same thing as a 3 from another.
The picker opens from the 360-review competencies screen under "Add from library". It has search across names and descriptions, a toggle to reveal the scale levels, an "already imported" marker on anything you took earlier, and multi-select — tick eight and add them in one action.
The grade library
Seven ready career ladders: SWE (full-stack engineer), backend, frontend, mobile, QA engineer, tech lead and product manager. Each has five levels and between 18 and 25 competencies grouped into four to seven categories, with requirement text written into every cell. This isn't a skeleton — it's a populated matrix, roughly a hundred written requirements per role.
Import lives on the grades page: pick a template, review its structure in a preview, name your own table and import. Names are yours from the first second — if your ladder is called "Engineer" rather than SWE, call it that.
What you import becomes yours
This is the important part. After import your company owns a plain, ordinary record — a competency or a grade table — with no link back to the library at all. Rename it, rewrite the description, change the scale, delete half the requirements, add your own: it's normal editing. Updates to the library on the platform side never touch or overwrite your copy.
So treat it as a draft: take twelve of the thirty-one, rewrite three to match how your company actually talks, drop two. That's an hour of work instead of two months.
The scale
A competency is scored 1 to 5 by default. The range is configurable — minimum and maximum anywhere between 0 and 10, with the minimum strictly below the maximum — and each value on the scale can carry a written explanation of what it means. Describing at least the two ends is strongly recommended; an unanchored scale turns a review into a matter of taste.
Competencies are snapshotted into reviews
When a competency is added to a review, its name, description and scale are copied into that review. From then on the catalogue and the review are independent: you can rename a competency, change its scale, or delete it outright, and running and closed reviews won't notice, while cross-review trend comparisons still line up.
It's a dull-sounding property that solves a concrete problem — you can clean up the competency catalogue without worrying about corrupting two years of review history.
Whose time this saves
HR — the first review or levelling rollout stops being a project with a working group. The draft already exists, so the discussion is about edits rather than about a blank page.
Managers — shared scale anchors. Scores from different managers become comparable because everyone read the same definition.
Employees — it's clear what is actually being measured. A competency with a description and level definitions reads as a rule; a competency that is one word reads as an invitation to guess.
Small companies without a dedicated HR function — a credible review can be launched by one person in an evening.
Getting started
Open the competency library and pick 8–12 for your first review; more than that on day one makes the reviewer's form unrealistically long. Read the anchors and rewrite the ones that don't sound like your company. For grades, take one template covering your largest role and refine it against real people rather than in the abstract.
Both libraries are available on every plan; plan limits apply to how many review cycles can be active at once, not to the size of your catalogue.