Appraisals within the manager self service model work fine. But now I had to give the HR department read-only access to all published appraisals, excluding the appraisals of HR people.

This can be done through the creation of a security profile, that shows all employees, except the HR emps.

Next, create a new responsibility, based on the manager self service, that is linked to the security profile above. Set the profile option HR_DISPLAY_PERSON_SEARCH to Yes for the responsibility.

As such, Hr people can enter the application with the responsibility above, and they have now the possibility to search for people (and to create an individual people list) within their security profile. Once they found the employee needed, they can view the published appraisals.