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.
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.
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.
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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