A former executive recruiter is pulling back the curtain on a widespread but rarely acknowledged corporate practice — one that she says is quietly shaping salaries, promotions, and morale in workplaces across the country.
In a viral Instagram post, leadership advisor and author Ginny Clarke warns employees that many companies don’t evaluate performance solely on merit. Instead, she says, they rely on what she calls “the secret bell curve” — a forced ranking system that predetermines who gets rewarded and who gets penalized long before performance reviews even begin.
Predetermined ratings, predetermined outcomes
According to Clarke, the framework often works like this:
- About 10% of employees are allowed to receive “exceptional” ratings.
- Another 10% must be categorized as “poor,” regardless of their actual performance.
- The remaining 80% are pushed into the middle — “meets expectations,” “needs improvement,” or “exceeds expectations.”
“This isn’t about performance, it’s about budgeting,” Clarke says in the video.
By controlling the distribution of ratings, companies can precisely forecast how much they will spend on raises and bonuses.
That means an employee’s final evaluation may have less to do with their actual contribution and more to do with “where you fall into your manager’s quota system,” she explains.
Collaboration suffers, competition thrives
Clarke, who spent years in executive recruiting, describes seeing the fallout firsthand.
“People stopped collaborating and started competing,” she recalls. When only a small slice of workers can be rewarded, the workplace becomes a zero-sum game.
Managers, she adds, often learned to game the system as well. Some kept underperforming employees who were close to retirement simply to avoid the disruption of firing them.
Meanwhile, “talented mid-career professionals got stuck in the ‘meets expectations’ category for budget reasons.”
The result: a system that rewards loyalty over productivity, distorting the very purpose of performance reviews.
A call for employees to reclaim control
Clarke’s message has struck a chord in an era when workers increasingly question traditional HR practices, from forced rankings to opaque promotion pipelines. Many viewers expressed shock, saying the revelation explained years of confusing or demoralizing reviews.
Her advice? Stop waiting for flawed internal systems to recognize your worth. Clarke urges workers to take charge of mapping their own career paths — a process she outlines in her downloadable Career Mapping Workbook.
“Your rating might have less to do with your mastery and more to do with the math,” she says. The challenge for employees now is to navigate their careers with eyes fully open.
As more corporate insiders shed light on hidden mechanisms like the “secret bell curve,” the public conversation around workplace fairness is only getting louder.
