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I'm a new project manager, and I have the authority to accept new employees who are still on probation. I'm assigning points to people in the following categories:
Is there anything else I should add?
Also, how can I measure attitude, skills, or teamwork? I'm still confused about how to make this decision.
The criteria you will use for assessment depend on what you, as a boss, value, on what's for you, as a boss, important.
You may create a long list of them (communication, honesty, humor, transparency...) , but people will get confused, so I'd limit to few, like 5 or 7, choosing the most important for you.
In my opinion more important than a list itself, is what do you mean under each of these criteria, i.e. attitude. Think of providing some examples of behavior that you expect, to make sure that the person that will be assessed knows your expectations. For example for Attitude you may write: focuses on problems not people, is willing to hear other people's opinions and so on.
Make sure you introduce criteria before the probation period begins! Otherwise it doesn't make sense - it's like playing a game without rules and in the end someone tells you that you have lost.
My personal advice: if you feel confused while making the decision, it means it's wrong one. You may want to read those posts about gut feeling recruitment:
Measuring skills or teamwork (whatever that actually means, assuming you can measure it at all) is really just a proxy for measuring whether someone is supporting the project and making a valuable contribution to the project's process. Even assuming that you're measuring something vaguely relevant (e.g. a person's level of expertise with database normalization on a data warehouse project), the only truly meaningful metric is whether that person is helping the project succeed.
I'm going to take a different spin on this than the other answerers, and state that I believe a PM's perspective needs to remain focused on project metrics. To the extent that people staff projects, personnel management will matter, but be sure you use the right filter.
If your company has an HR department, involve them. Your metrics, however, should be driven by the project's needs. In an agile team, individuals are not measured separately; the entire team succeeds or fails as a whole. This is critical to the core concept of building successful, cross-functional teams.
So, I'd throw out your metrics and use something more measurable from a project perspective. Some examples (and I stress, these are only examples, although I use many of them myself) might be:
IT projects fail...a lot. One essay cites a study reporting a 62% overall failure rate for IT projects. Make sure you look at the project goals, its processes, and its management before assuming that the cause of failure must be the members of the project team.
Is the goal to remove the bottom 10%, 15% of those on probation or is this simply a process everyone goes through before becoming a full employee?
If the former, then you need measurable, hard criteria, not soft ones you listed. It needs to be tied to what they do, something you can count and measure, and then the bottom 10% gets whacked.
If the latter, then I would suggest you have NO criteria, and by that I mean no special criteria other than the same ones you use for all employees for year-end reviews. They have already passed your hiring criteria to get through the door, notwithstanding the extremely flawed interviewing process. To know whether a candidate is a total right fit is going to be more an art than a science. It's a 'you_know_when_you_know' kind of thing. And in some cases, their performance at task is good but they are simply not a fit in the culture, which sort of degrades their overall performance, right? Can you put a point to that? Maybe, but I suspect your gut will be screaming the answer more than a point will show.
But here is the risk you need to mitigate: your personal biases. These are very hard to control. And the more you think you are unbiased, the more you are. While you might be the final decision maker on this, you may want to use a panel approach, where two or three others also weigh in with their findings. This will help keep your biases checked.
EDIT: As I thought more about this, I think I need to mention the HR Department's perspective on things. You MUST check-in with them to learn what the formal things are you need to accomplish. Likely, you will have to conduct a formal employee review, just like the normal year-end reviews everyone else goes through, and rate the employee. HR will need documentation to support removing an employee. So while this might be a gut decision for you, your normal criteria for reviews will need to be used.
It is best to consult with the managers who have had the probationary resources working for them up to now. Presumably they will be the ones providing you with the ratings based on their experience with the resources to date. Be careful to ensure:
I commend your attempt to "objectify" the evaluation. Setting up the criteria improves the chance that you'll treat everyone fairly and reduce creeping bias.
I've got some misgivings about "attitude". I'm not sure I'd want to measure that. Any situation I can imagine in which I would mark a team member down for attitude would reflect negatively on teamwork and other attributes. You may wish to consult You Can’t Interview for Attitude. His style is a bit artificial and he definitely has an agenda, but I think it is a useful resource for job evaluations.
