Three Weeks Into A New Hire
By week three you usually know. What the reliable early signals are, why managers wait anyway, and what a properly used probation period actually looks like.
What week three actually tells you
Not skill. Skill takes longer and improves. Three weeks tells you about the things that do not change:
Do they turn up on time, consistently. ⚠️ The single most predictive signal, and it is visible immediately.
Do they ask when they do not know. People who guess at week three guess at week thirty.
How do they handle being corrected. Once is enough to see it.
Do other staff route around them. ⚠️ Watch who gets asked to cover, and who does not. Your team has already formed a view and it is usually right.
Why nothing happens
Replacing them means recruiting again, which is work nobody wants.
"They might improve." Sometimes true for skill. ⚠️ Rarely true for the four signals above.
Nobody wrote down what the probation period is for. So it passes, and the decision defaults to "keep".
The other direction
The same three weeks are when good new people decide about you.
Somebody strong who is being under-used, ignored, or given no feedback is deciding right now, and you will hear about it as a resignation in month two.
⚠️ The conversation that keeps a good hire is the same conversation that resolves a poor one, and most venues have neither.
What the conversation is
Fifteen minutes, at three weeks, scheduled in advance:
What is going well, specifically. Not "fine" — one concrete thing.
What needs to change, specifically. One thing, with what good looks like.
Ask them what is not working. ⚠️ This is the half that gets skipped, and it is where you find out that nobody showed them the till procedure, or that a particular shift is unworkable for them.
Say what happens next and when.
The decision
After that conversation, one of three:
Confirm them. Say so explicitly — it matters more than managers expect.
Extend with one named condition. "We will look again in three weeks, and the thing that has to change is X." ⚠️ Vague extensions are just delay wearing a costume.
End it. Sooner is kinder. A person who is not suited to this room finds out in month one or month six, and month one costs them less too.
What it costs to wait
Your team notices. Somebody visibly not working out, retained without comment, tells everyone what the standard actually is.
The good hires read it too. ⚠️ This is the part that is never counted — carrying a poor fit costs you people you wanted to keep.
Separate the three things week three shows you
Can they do the job trainable, usually
Will they turn up reliably rarely changes
Do they fit how the room works hardest to judge, easiest to get wrong
⚠️ One is the only one people assess, and it is the one most likely to improve on its own.
The one that does not improve
⇒ Reliability. Three weeks of lateness is not settling in; it is the pattern. Everything else deserves patience — this deserves a conversation now.
What you are actually seeing at week three
Their best effort, under supervision, with allowances being made
⚠️ This is the ceiling, not the floor. Performance at week three usually goes down slightly at week eight as the allowances stop and the novelty does.
⇒ ⚠️ So "they will grow into it" is a bet against the usual direction. Make it deliberately, not by default.
Whose failure is it
Not told what good looks like yours
Told once, in week one yours
Told, shown, corrected, still theirs
⚠️ Most week-three problems are in the first two rows, and firing on them repeats the same result with the next hire.
The check before any decision
"Could they say what a good shift looks like, in their own words?"
⇒ If no, the training failed, not the person.
The conversation, at three weeks
1. One specific thing going well
2. One specific thing to change, with what good looks like
3. "What is not working for you?"
⚠️ Three is the half people skip, and it is where you learn the rota, the buddy, or the brief was the problem.
What waiting costs
The team covers, quietly, and stops mentioning it
Your good people carry it and remember that they did
The person themselves loses three more weeks
⚠️ Two is the expensive one. Tolerating a bad fit is read by everyone else as the standard, and your best staff are the first to draw that conclusion.
Write down what you decided, either way
Date, what was discussed, what changes, when you look again
⚠️ "Give it another few weeks" without a date is not a decision — it is a deferral that becomes permanent.
Three weeks in, most managers already know whether someone is going to work out.
Almost nobody acts on it, and the waiting is expensive in both directions.
Three to hold
Lateness in the first three weeks, by person. The most predictive number you have and one of the easiest to keep.
Whether the three-week conversation happened. ⚠️ Usually it did not. That is the finding.
Retention at three months against whether that conversation happened. The number that proves it is worth the fifteen minutes.
Where the record has to sit
Attendance in the first weeks is the signal, and it is only a signal if it is recorded somewhere that can be looked at later. Where shifts are kept on a whiteboard that gets wiped, the pattern exists and nobody can see it.
tasteck keeps shift and attendance history against each person, so three weeks of a new person's record can be read in one place before the conversation rather than recalled during it.
By week three you know. The only question is whether you are going to do anything about it before month six.
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