> 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.
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.