[NikolaNovak]

True Probationary period / uncertain employment is

1. Untenable for employees - of I have a mortgage or family or plans or obligations let alone a current job, taking this kind of risk is unacceptable

2. Untenable for companies - that's way too much investment.

Companies do have probation periods formally but they are exceeeeedingly rarely invoked, for above reasons.

[Dudeman112]

Might I introduce you to Europe?

Works here. My org recently ditched a bad hire with it.

[NikolaNovak]

I think we'd need to share more detail (and fwiw, I'm half from europe and half from Canada :).

Certainly companies have probation periods. And on paper, that reality and what's proposed in previous post are similar.

But I think there's a massive real world difference between "Default stay hired" and "Default not stay hired".

Probation, as it has currently been implemented in most companies I've worked in, exists, is formal, can and has been used, but is an exception. It's used when there's a massive, unanticipated, egregious problem in performance.

What is sometimes proposed in these threads is effectively replacing long/multiple interviews, with a probation period. While such probation period may look similar or same on paper, I think it's a completely different approach: "We're sure of you (though possibly wrong) so we're hiring you" vs "We're not sure of you so let's hire you and see!". I for one would have only touched the latter with a 100ft pole maybe once in my life. Certainly, I imagine anybody with current job and monthly obligations, would be quite wary in taking a "we don't know so let's try it!" approach to hiring. No, let's figure it out first please :)

[vidarh]

I've only done the latter in the form of being brought on as a contractor at (high) contractor rates but with the understanding they'd prefer to have me join full time, at a time when I was already doing contracting and had other clients in parallel covering parts of my costs. In that situation I was not taking on any more risk than I had already chosen (and planned for) by contracting, so it was fine.

It's the only kind of context in which I'd ever consider the "we don't know so let's try it" approach.