Shawnee Love   •  
August 19, 2016

As I have blogged before, I am not a fan of traditional probationary periods, yet it is unrealistic to ignore the fact that hiring processes are imperfect and new hires are not always all they were supposed to be.  A probationary period is a 3 month  or 90 day time frame within which:

1. A new hire should prove that s/he can learn and become competent in the work, and
2. An employer can fire that new hire for any reason without having to provide notice or pay in lieu of notice.

In practice, many jobs take a lot longer than 3 months to learn, and as such organizations want to stretch the probationary period up to 6 months or a year.  That works for the first purpose of probationary periods, but fails to work for part two because it violates employment laws in Canada.

I am an advocate for replacing the probationary period with 2 separate policies, one for termination and one for training phases (aka introductory periods, etc.).

Your training phase policy will allow for  the length of time it takes an individual with good intentions to get up to speed in the job and might differ by job or even new hire.  Your termination policy will identify what notice or pay in lieu of notice you will provide and must meet or beat the applicable minimum standards.

If we could get rid of the outdated and mostly inapplicable probationary period once and for all, what would you call the training phase for your new hire?