Basically everywhere in NA has allowances for probationary periods with at-will employment. Moreover, prospective hires could start on contract.
Morale is improved when team members feel like they have some control over their membership.
It seems like you're assuming that a great many people would be fired; why so? In my experience, having worked for several such companies, firing is rare because even minimal filters are effective.
Resume check, reference check, and meet the team. Done.
I’m not saying you’re categorically wrong, but this doesn’t match with my experience, at all. If you’re an HM and this works for you and your company, great, but the HMs responding here don’t agree.
The processes you are questioning scale to thousands of people with varying backgrounds. It’s not an accident all of these companies do this. Your process places extreme trust in one group of people. It’s just so risky.
Also, resumes are mostly bullshit, IMO. Reference checks are complete bullshit, IMO. I’ve worked with my buddies at startups (who get lofty titles) and just have them give me reference checks. Other references have asked me for call scripts.
Also keep in mind that most of these big tech jobs are highly competitive. Your solution eventually requires a coin toss if you have limited spots. There’s only so much data you can collect from the process you propose. The natural thing is to then assess each candidate a bit more until you’re confident you’ve picked the right one.
And then you’re here.
Truly bullshit credentialing is immediately apparent to teams that receive new hires. In some places, it's fraud and actionable by the company as fraud.
I don't think companies with billions in revenue really have a budget constraint on hiring; it's structural constraints that are holding them back. They can, and do, engage in mass hiring and construction of whole new departments when it suits their strategy.
That said, further constraints can happen at the credentialling level; I'm not advocating hiring literally anyone.
What's practically possible is always a subset of what's legally possible. I think probationary periods/contract-to-hire situations are extremely unlikely to work for anything beyond absolute entry level, for a number of reasons.
For one thing, it's a huge amount of uncertainty to put on the potential hire, which means you'll be strongly biasing your hiring pool towards people who don't have better options. It feels like in an effort to reduce the interview time, you've effectively expanded it to multiple months.
Second, how do you calibrate the "default" option? Is the expectation that everyone on a probation period will be hired unless proven otherwise, or is it that most will be let go unless actively vouched for? Is that expectation clear across the team? If there's a mismatch across team members, you have big problems. People who want to keep a prospect will be annoyed if they're let go, and vice versa. People who need to work with a prospect will have to figure out whether it's safe to actually trust them with anything - on the one hand, you have to give them enough work to prove themselves; on the other hand, you can't give them anything too important or with too long a horizon, because they might be gone before they get to launch.
And finally - how long does that trial period need to go on to be useful? The goal in designing a hiring process is to get a reasonable level of precision/recall (different companies will balance differently between those) with a reasonable level of investment. If you've increased investment without increasing precision, then you've done something wrong. Given how long it takes to ramp up a new hire and have them actually be productive, I don't think you're going to learn much in a ~6 month probationary period that you couldn't already tell in a day of interviews.
The default option is simple: did the hire add meaningful value to the team? Very few people fail that simple test, in my experience; and folks who would have failed technical screenings would have excelled in subsequent performance-enhancing evaluations. Someone who can't balance a binary tree might be the single best technical coordinator you're going to hire, after all.
I've worked at many companies, and those that hire fast, and fire fast, tend to be those that _fire least_. They have _lower expectations_ for performance, and so are more likely to be receptive to _training new hires_, rather than expecting them to hit the ground running as equally effective as their new team mates.
Morale is improved when team members feel like they have some control over their membership.
It seems like you're assuming that a great many people would be fired; why so? In my experience, having worked for several such companies, firing is rare because even minimal filters are effective.
Resume check, reference check, and meet the team. Done.