A candidate who is at an elevated risk of being replaced by severance, which is a position most new hires are in, is probably putting their aspirations on hold while you figure out if they are the right fit. Severance is typically enough to keep an employee above water for a time while they find a new position that fits them better, but it certainly isn't anything people can build dreams on top of.

I think there is a common point of view that wants to assume that recruiting a good fit is something that you determine based on a set of input, and then commit to. If you have to reassess at a later time, and especially if you have to reverse your decision, you've failed at recruiting, and in a way that is preventable in a deterministic way. Experience suggests that people who believe this do one of two things: either they attach an ethical weight to the employee/employer relationship that means you have to weight the cost to your business against the cost to your sense of self-worth; or, they have gotten lucky enough up to this point to meet/interview/hire people who have not misrepresented themselves or otherwise projected an image that they would be much more valuable than they proved to be.

Having been involved in a number of instances in the last two years that have exposed me to the randomness of recruitment and hiring, even using all of the hacks people use to remove the error, I'm honestly a little surprised that people can have any imperatives about recruitment. The whole things seems at best stochastic, and errors are unpreventable.

I think the reason why people are so reluctant to man up is because it means they failed at something we believe they shouldn't fail at. I would argue they've failed as something we all fail at, and that accepting that will make the whole process better for everyone.

> What most employers don't do - either by system or personally - is man up and admit they hired the wrong person, replace them with severance and move on.

For better or worse, that is legally difficult in many places. Once you commit to hiring a permanent employee, you are obligated to some extent to try to work with them and resolve any problems. Firing them outright can be almost impossible unless either their position is literally redundant (in which case obviously you won't immediately be hiring someone else to do the job, will you?) or they are guilty of gross misconduct (such as doing something that involved the police being called to remove them from the office).

It seems common in the jurisdictions I know about for the full employee protections and benefits to kick in over a period of time, maybe on a sliding scale so they aren't fully in effect until a year or two after taking a job, so it's not completely one-sided. But you definitely get employees who play the game and make things that IMHO should be their personal responsibility into an employer's problem. For example, here in the UK there are rules about statutory pay for things like maternity leave. It's not uncommon for someone to take maternity leave for several months, with their employer required to keep paying them at a certain level throughout, and then not go back to work at the end. The problem is, sometimes an action as significant as having a child really does change your perspective and priorities that much, and the employee did go on leave genuinely expecting to return, and other times they knew damn well they weren't coming back the moment they walked out the door but cashed in anyway, and there's no objective way to tell the difference.

To a larger company, where this isn't going to happen very often, you can to some extent write it off as a cost of doing business. But to a small company, being down a member of staff at all can be seriously damaging, and paying out a load of statutory benefits and then getting screwed can literally cause your business to fail. But the rules are what they are, and as long as you have to play by those rules, any employer in such a context is going to be very careful about who they agree to hire on a permanent basis, and a probationary period after hiring isn't unreasonable IMHO.

I'm not aware of the maternity rules in the UK, but I believe that in Canada if somebody attempted the same thing and didn't go back to work they would owe the maternity top-up provided by the company. Of course, there is a certain amount provided by national/federal benefits, however that doesn't affect the employer net-net cash if they get that back.*

I agree though that there is a certain amount of uncertainty when folks are close to coming back from maternity leave. However, keep in mind that the organization (big or small) would have had to fill the position in any case during the maternity period.

* In Canada, maternity leave can take up to something like 50 weeks if the father chooses not to use up their paternity leave.