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Management

Mastering the Trial Period: A Guide for Hiring Engineers

Learn how to master the trial period when hiring engineers. Navigate challenges, validate candidates effectively, and build a successful team.

 

Hiring a new engineer is an essential part of the manager’s mission. Although we can check several skills and mindsets during the interviews, such as the candidate’s mastery of technical skills (through practical exercises, pair programming sessions, review of the candidate’s code repository, … ), soft skills (is the candidate a good speaker, are they fluent in English or any other language required by the company, are they synthetic, do they have an excellent capacity to adapt, …), fit with the company’s culture, complementary skills you are looking for to complement the team, or do they seem to have an excellent human touch with the rest of the team, you cannot be 100% sure that this is indeed the right candidate you are looking for for your team until they join the team and start working with the rest of the team.

In reality, the hiring process will help you filter out people who do not match any of the above-mentioned mandatory skills with a good chance. However, it depends on many factors, such as the interviewers’ experience in the recruitment process, the question chosen to check the candidate’s skills, and some subjective information unrelated to the job requirements**. When the person joins the team, you will validate that the assumptions you made during the interviews were correct, and you can prove that you made the right choice.

The trial period is a mechanism in the labor law of various countries that allows engineers to break the contract between the employee and the company for a limited period, typically four months, in France. Establishing such a period is not an obligation, but the company almost always imposes it on newcomers.

To conclude with the generalities, the company or the employee can renew the trial period, for example, if one of the two parties is not 100% convinced at the end of the first period. In this case, the period is renewed up to a maximum duration, depending on the status of the employee (in 2023 in France, the maximum duration of the trial period for an engineer is eight months, with typically a first period of 4 months which can be renewed for four additional months, see source.

The company or the employee can interrupt a trial period at any time, subject to certain specificities that I will cover in the section “Should I term the trial period?”. Therefore, it is essential to be transparent about your expectations regarding the position, the benefits offered by the company, etc… during the interview process.

❯  Some statistics concerning the trial period for France

According to this article, in 2020 and France, approximately 19% of long-term contracts were terminated during the trial period. This statistic is even higher (20%) in the service sector.

In a 2017 study in France, compared to other sectors, IT companies hire the most relative to the company size (14.9%) but are the worst at targeting profiles with the right skills for the position opened (2.1%). The same study also estimates that failing to hire an employee during the trial period costs between 50k€ and 100k€ per employee, depending on factors such as the position and the salary. This represents approximately 4.31% of a company’s wage bill, which is far from negligible!

Finally, in this article, we learn that the employee breaks 61% of trial periods that are prematurely ended. Of these, 40% are due to professional disillusionment (expectations during the hiring process versus the reality of the position). The main areas for improvement in the hiring process identified in the article are:

  • Be as transparent as possible about the mission and environment of the position to reduce the gap between the candidate’s expectations and the reality of the position;
  • Be more demanding of the candidate’s motivation and investment in the future role;
  • Reinforce the verification of the essential skills expected for the position.

❯  Follow-up of the trial period

The trial period is undeniably a stressful moment in an employee’s career. They may have decided to leave a comfortable position in another company to join yours because the values of your company make sense to them, or they may be looking for new challenges or want to learn new things, or they may have decided to change career direction, or perhaps this is the very first company they will be joining upon graduation, … Whatever the candidate’s background, they will not be comfortable in the company until they have learned how the company works, learned to work with their new teams, and obviously after having acquired some experience with the latest technologies that the company uses. And they will have to deal with the big sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, which is the trial period. You have to be aware of their particular mindset during this time frame. It would be best to try to remove unnecessary stress by giving your new team members every chance to validate their trial period. You can do this by communicating regularly with them, including how the trial period is going from your perspective. You should also be clear about your expectations, for example, by sharing with them an onboarding plan with a set of tasks to be validated. It would be best to talk to their direct colleagues to get their feedback (positive or negative). Suppose all the signals are positive, great (and if we go back to the statistics from the beginning of the article, this is the case for ~80% of the trial periods). If not, based on the negative feedback, make explicit the areas of improvement they will focus on for the rest of the trial period. It is imperative **to share these expectations with the employee as soon as possible ** so that they have the opportunity to adjust their behavior accordingly.

I recommend organizing regular meetings with the employees dedicated to the follow-up of their trial period to ensure that you will have moments to give feedback to your employees, which is essential for their success. In the section ”How do I organize myself to conduct these trial periods?” I will detail how often I set up these meetings.

❯  Should I renew the trial period?

Unless you have doubts about the employee’s match with the company, the team, and the skills you identified as essential, you should not renew the trial period. This is especially true for engineers (because the 4-month initial period is usually long enough to decide whether or not they should stay with the company).

From the employee’s point of view, automatically renewing a trial period without a solid argument (such as skills that were not thoroughly tested during the initial period and a solid plan spelled out in terms of expectations for the new period) is unfair gives the feeling that the manager doesn’t care about the efforts they made during the initial period, and increases the stress induced by this period of insecurity.

That being said, there are also excellent reasons to renew a trial period:

  • The initial period did not allow you to have a genuine conviction as to the suitability of the candidate for the company (despite the long duration of the first period);

🚨 In this case, since you could not decide during the initial period, you must quickly determine what criteria you will choose to validate during the trial period. The risk of not doing so is that you will still be hesitating at the end of the second period about what to do with the trial period and will end up making a decision you will regret. If the employee does not adapt well to the company, breaking the contract with the company will be a much more complex operation… and certainly more costly for the company!

  • A negative point, a blocker for the validation, has recently emerged regarding the employee, and you need extra time to gather more information and ask the employee to work on this. This new period is then an additional time for the employee to demonstrate their ability to improve their skills/behaviors) ;
  • The team still has doubts about their ability to work with them (you should work closely with the team to resolve these doubts within a reasonable time frame).

If you are in one of these conditions, renewing the trial period is correct.

❯  Should I validate the trial period?

At the end of the initial period, you are satisfied with your new employees and have decided to hire them. Congratulations, it’s time to validate their trial period!

A good exercise to ensure that validation is the right decision is to answer a series of questions, focusing on the employee’s alignment with the soft and hard skills expected for the position and their alignment with the company itself and its values. Here are the questions I focus on when deciding whether a trial period should be validated.

❯  Concerning the newcomer’s mastery of “hard skills”

  • Is the new hire performing well in their new role? Does it match the skills required for the role (e.g., if it is a software engineer role, has they submitted pull requests demonstrating good practices that underscore their seniority / does the code have the right level of quality / is there a set of unit tests covering the functionality being delivered)?
  • Did the new hire struggle to gain knowledge / get comfortable in their new role, or did they ramp up fairly quickly?
  • What topics did they work on? What is the feedback from others who have worked with them on these topics? Is it positive?

❯  They fit with their team and soft skills

  • Is the employee well involved and integrated into the team?
  • What complementary or attractive skills for the team did you identify during the hiring process? Has the employee * practiced these skills since joining*?
  • Have they adopted the correct principle used by the rest of the team (e.g., pair programming, test-driven development, …)?

❯  The fit with the company and its values

  • Did they behave professionally overall? Are they consistently on time for meetings? Are they active in and participate in team meetings? Do they demonstrate good overall behavior (e.g., the “disagree and commit” principle)?
  • Does the employee’s mindset and behavior match the company’s culture, values, and principles?

Based on the answers to these different questions and your opinion regarding the criticality of the potential axes of improvement, you should be able to decide if you can welcome them as a permanent team member!

❯  Should I term the trial period?

Tip: Never wait for one of the regular meetings mentioned above if something critical to the success of the trial period comes up. It would be best to share with the employee that this must be readjusted immediately. Following the same logic, keeping an employee when you have already chosen not to validate their trial period is **always a wrong decision **: it is not fair to the employee, it can be harmful to the team (either the employee’s behavior is not acceptable, or incompatible with the team, or the skills are below the level initially expected, which can cause frustration and anger within the team / waste the team’s time, or the team has started to adopt the employee and build some sympathy with him/her, and waiting before making the decision, for example for fear of hurting the team, will undoubtedly be much more damaging in the end for the team’s mood).

"…

I did this once as an inexperienced manager: I interviewed an engineer as part of my company’s hiring process. My interview concluded that he was a total match for the hard skills required for the position (with seniority and abilities above the average level of my team at that time, and mine in particular), which was great since I was looking for an experienced profile to help the team grow in their role and gain seniority and best practices. I wasn’t convinced by his soft skills, particularly his ability to communicate and work in a team. Still, given his particular fit with the technical skills and our difficulties in recruiting developer profiles, I gave my manager and HR the green light to hire him like many companies.

That was the first mistake I made in this story.

A few days after his arrival (and after a speedy technical onboarding where he was fully operational in less than two days, as far as I remember), we decided to integrate him into a team working on a feature. He then started working on a few tickets (successfully and with excellent quality). Someone on my team reviewed one of his pull requests and left a comment on GitHub. Here’s the drama. The newcomer refused the feedback quite aggressively, and the unsettled reviewer canceled his suggestion and avoided contacting him directly to resolve the situation. I then decided to get the reason why he reacted so aggressively and replied that the feedback was ridiculous and a complete waste of time.

There are no surprises, as this is precisely what I spotted during the interview. I decided to lie to myself for the wrong reasons and gave the green light to hire him. It was a gamble I lost badly.

I spoke with my manager and informed him of the situation. He asked me if I wanted to terminate with him. I told him I needed more time to decide (spoiler: that was the wrong answer). The following weeks confirmed the situation: the collaboration between him and the rest of the team was painful, and it started to impact the team’s mood. Again, I chose to continue the trial, partly because of the work involved and partly because he was particularly good at delivering features. Finally, towards the end of his trial period (well, and once the pressure on deliveries had sufficiently subsided), I scheduled a meeting to ask him about his comfort in his role and collaboration with the team. Finally, after discussing upcoming projects, he said he wasn’t interested in anything and decided to end his time with the company.

It was a chain of bad decisions. In the end, it impacted the team, who suffered for several months working with him, but also suffered when they learned he had decided to leave (since he had real seniority and, therefore, effectiveness, they felt guilty about his decision). It was a personal failure, and I felt like I had wasted much energy on it. And I knew I had decided to wait, for the wrong reasons, before making the only right decision. To top it all off, I didn’t dare to make that decision, and I preferred to convince him to end the period instead of making that decision myself.

This story concludes that if you have already identified that some of the mandatory skills for the position are missing, the candidate is not the right one. When you are specific during the trial period that the candidate is not meeting your expectations or negatively impacting the team, you must decide to terminate the collaboration, regardless of the (wrong) reasons you might have for continuing the trial period.

…"

Since hiring a new employee is cumbersome and usually very costly and time-consuming, and since we are human and want to keep a human approach within the company, you should always (except in certain exceptional cases, such as unacceptable behavior) allow the employee to prove himself and readjust his behavior after your feedback. If they have failed in this adjustment, and you still consider it mandatory in their mission within the company, it is time to break the probation period.

🚨️ In France, a notice period applies if you break the trial period. In the case of an engineer, for example, this period is 24 hours if they have been with the company for less than eight days, 48 hours if they have been with the company for between 8 days and one month, two weeks if they have been with the company for between 1 month and three months, and one month otherwise. In some exceptional cases (e.g., specific toxicity of the employee that impacts the mood or efficiency of the rest of the team), you can ignore this period and immediately terminate the employee’s contract. Still, in this case, the company must pay the salary and benefits the employee would have received during this period.

❯  How do I organize myself to conduct these trial periods?

In addition to the various meetings dedicated to welcoming the newcomer to the company (for these 1:1 meetings with the rest of the team are planned presentations made by the different departments of the company, such as the marketing, legal, or HR team for example), I set up meetings with them dedicated to the follow-up of their trial period at regular times until the end of the trial period. I schedule a meeting two weeks after their arrival, then one month, two months, and three months after their arrival. The interest of these meetings is multiple: it is a privileged moment between the newcomer and you to dedicate to the follow-up of the trial period, to share the feedback on the progress of the period, to question the motivation of the employee and his point of view on his integration in the team. It is also interesting for you, as a manager, to ensure that you regularly devote time to monitoring the trial period.

I am also creating a follow-up document dedicated to their trial period, which I will fill in regularly with the data I collect (either from my observations or from the feedback I get from their colleagues during informal discussions or the 1:1, for example). Filling out this document regularly, with exemplary thoroughness, is my best partner in deciding whether or not to validate their trial period. And it is also an excellent source of information to answer the various questions I listed in the “Should I renew the trial period?” section.

I also create several reminders at certain critical times, roughly one week before each meeting (to prepare for these checkpoints and gather feedback from the new hire’s colleagues) and a reminder two weeks before the end of the trial period. This last reminder is used to decide whether or not to validate their trial period, and I will inform the company of my decision at least one week before the end of the trial.

I take a moment with the managee before the first meeting to tell them what my expectations are for the trial period, how I will proceed (with the different meetings I have set up to monitor this trial period and give feedback regularly), the fact that I will periodically gather input from their companions, and the criteria on which I will decide if the trial period is a success or not.

Finally, once the trial period is validated, 🍾I celebrate this news🍾 with the rest of the team and with the whole company, for example, during an all hands, a presentation shared with all coworkers, during a team moment, an after-work or a demo, … This moment is significant for them, it is the end of this stressful period. By celebrating this, I want to reward their efforts and welcome them as a permanent team member!

❯  Sources