Overview 

There are several things to consider when you choose the number of milestones per cycle such as:

• How long is your review cycle?
• Do you want managers to do a full evaluation at that time?
• Will you use introductory review cycles?

Milestones automatically generate when you create a review based on system settings. The review cycle divides up equally by the milestones, except for introductory reviews. Introductory reviews are for new employees and include a shorter review cycle and therefore do not receive milestones. For example, if you have a 90-day introductory review cycle and 4 milestones, in a 90 day period the supervisor would receive 4 reminders. That is too frequent for most organizational needs.

However, the review after the introductory review and other normal review cycles will all receive automatically generated milestones. For example, if you have a review start January 1^st and end December 31^st and four milestones in your system settings, the milestones would automatically generate for:

• January 1^st
• April 2^nd
• July 2^nd
• October 1^st

This is because 365/4 = 91 days. Since 2017 is not a leap year, 91 days after January 1st is April 2nd.

Let’s look at another example. Let’s say an employee receives an annual review based on their anniversary date but will start with a 90-day introductory review. If the employee starts on July 1^st, their reviews and milestones will look like this:

• Introductory Review - 7/1/17 to 9/29/17
  • No milestones created
• Annual Review 2017 - 9/30/2017 to 6/30/18
  • 9/30/17 milestone
  • 12/7/17 milestone
  • 2/13/18 milestone
  • 4/23/18 milestone
• Annual Review 2018 - 7/1/18 to 6/30/19
  • 7/1/218 milestone
  • 10/1/18 milestone
  • 12/31/18 milestone
  • 4/1/19 milestone 

Milestones do not explicitly require a supervisor to add feedback and/or scores. They are only reminders to check off. Therefore, if you need a supervisor to perform a full evaluation of an employee, you should use cycles and not milestones to enforce this policy. If your organization would like supervisors to perform a full evaluation every 6 months, you should set your review cycle to 6 months and optionally use milestones to check in during those 6 months.

• Note: If the setting "Allow Employee Feedback" is enabled, the system will generate feedback milestones for the employee, in addition to the supervisor