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Comment by HarHarVeryFunny | Hacker News Reader

It seems the benefit would be one sided - that initial 100 -> 10 (ATS/interview/coin-flip) filtering processes would as usual have a large percentage of both false positive and false negatives.

The false negatives suck for both candidate and hiring company who have accidentally rejected someone they would have like to have hired.

The benefit of the "provisional employment" process would be that even if it doesn't help avoid the false negatives, it would weed out the false positives so that the company at least ends up hiring people who are qualified and a good fit (even though due to the false negatives they may have rejected even better candidates).

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Instead of having “provisional employment”, could we instead just have 30/60/90 day plans and evaluate the performance of the engineer and fire them if they don’t meet that criteria at the 90 day mark?

The only candidates who would be willing to sign up for that would be ones who were currently unemployed, and with the financial reserves to be able to risk being back out of work in 30/60/90 days.

Given how arbitrary in terms of talent mass layoffs are, there are of course tons of highly qualified out-of-work candidates (and due to age discrimination, maybe some of the best/most-experienced ones!), so this certainly might work to draw from that pool of candidates.

I was being facetious, sorry if that wasn’t clear. That’s just how Regular Employment works. You don’t even need to tell the employee the implications of being on the 90 day plan. You tell them up front what the expectations are for the role, and if they don’t meet them in 90 days, you fire them. Does not need to be more complicated than that.

30/60/90 is pretty standard stuff. It’s literally the documentation and justification you need to fire the employee at the 90 day mark if you need to. Like a preemptive PIP if you will.

I don’t want to hire anyone who doesn’t want to be held accountable to what they say they can do anyway.

> You tell them up front what the expectations are for the role, and if they don’t meet them in 90 days, you fire them.

In the US at least, firing people for cause is difficult to do. More likely you just wait for next RIF and include your low-performers on the list.

So, yes, this is business as usual to some extent, but it's not a very cost effective or efficient way of hiring. If you really have work that needs doing, then you want to hire someone able to do it, not have a haphazard hiring process where it's a crapshoot and "if they don't work out we'll just fire them in our annual RIF, and try again".

Limited sample size but I've not worked anywhere in the US that didn't have a 90 day carve out for terminating people from date of hire, MegaCorp or SMB.

Of course it's not cost effective, or efficient, but as the article points out, nothing really is, and this method is at least preferable to the weird quasi-employment situation the article proposes

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