>> Give everyone a long probation period, and allowing them to seek feedback frequently as to how they can influence the decision to hire them on a more permanent basis so that the final decision will not be a surprise binary event.
Hypothetically, let's assume every company follows this method and around 30% of the employees who went through long probation period didn't make it through. Wouldn't that leave the employees in an even worse situation than getting rejected immediately, since they resigned their current job and now everyone in his professional circle knows that he or she didn't make it through company X's probation period? In addition to that, the employer will also accrue a lot more negative publicity from the employees who didn't make it through.
This will not be as big a problem as you assume because the "everyone in his professional circle who knows that he or she didn't make it through company X's probation period" would also have gotten their fair chance to try their hand at being a Google or Apple employee, to aim as high as possible, and would have faced the same rate of rejection.
It is only a problem if failing probation is a huge black mark. If there are a large number of people for whom the company-employee fit didn't occur, the word "probation" would lose it's sting. Maybe we can call it an "apprenticeship" period? Or other innocuous term without previous negative connotation.
> In addition to that, the employer will also accrue a lot more negative publicity from the employees who didn't make it through.
The same could be said of ex-employees, too.
In general, the problem is the neurosis of giving too much importance to "failure" or "probation". It is ironic that this is the case even in a startup discussion board :-)
Hypothetically, let's assume every company follows this method and around 30% of the employees who went through long probation period didn't make it through. Wouldn't that leave the employees in an even worse situation than getting rejected immediately, since they resigned their current job and now everyone in his professional circle knows that he or she didn't make it through company X's probation period? In addition to that, the employer will also accrue a lot more negative publicity from the employees who didn't make it through.