It is a great model, but many HR departments will not let you do this. Every termination becomes an exercise in endless documentation, including what you thought was an open-and-shut, by the numbers trial period.
It is a great model, but many HR departments will not let you do this. Every termination becomes an exercise in endless documentation, including what you thought was an open-and-shut, by the numbers trial period.
That seems like a self-inflicted HR problem.
In the UK, employment law is strongly on the side of the employee, and so I'd understand HR departments trying to do everything they can to protect the employer. But having a (typically 3-month) probation period is common in almost every company, and it's not uncommon for people to be let go in the third month when they haven't been up to standard. Everybody knows it happens, and in fact you can see people's attitudes shift - for the first 3 months, every new employee is tiptoeing around very gentle, trying not to offend anyone, going above and beyond so that they are seen to be making a positive impact. After the probation period ends, most people revert to a "normal" working attitude, everything's a bit more relaxed, you'd push back on unreasonable demands, etc.
In somewhere like the US, where the laws strongly favour the employers, I'm surprised that HR departments make it so hard to fire people in a trial period. If you can fire people for any reason, underperformance in a trial period seems the most safe reason possible for dismissal.
The opposite extreme is France where employment law favours employees so much, many companies are reticent to hire at all because it's so hard to fire someone once hired.