Hiring from July?

The clock on unfair dismissal rights is already ticking.

This is the change I most want to make sure does not slip past you, because it is easy to miss in the noise around everything else coming from the Employment Rights Act 2025.

From January 2027, the qualifying period for unfair dismissal protection drops from two years to six months. That fundamentally changes the risk profile of every hiring decision you make. But here is the point that most businesses are not yet focusing on: any employee you hire from 1 July 2026 onwards will begin accruing rights under the shorter qualifying period, even though the change does not formally take effect until January.

If you recruit from July and the relationship is not working by December, you may already be in considerably riskier territory than you expect. The window to address performance concerns under the old rules is closing. The time to build a robust, structured probationary process is now, before you hire under the new regime.

What this changes about how you hire

More than many businesses realise. Skills and qualifications you can test and verify at interview. Attitude, values, the way someone approaches challenges and interacts with colleagues: those take time to surface. Time that you are about to have considerably less of.

The organisations that will navigate this best are those that invest upfront in understanding who they are genuinely hiring. That means structured interviews designed to probe for values and behaviours, not just CVs. It means assessment approaches that look at how candidates think and act, not just what they have done before.

Consider it this way. You have always been able to identify a technical skills mismatch within the first two months. Identifying and managing a cultural or attitudinal mismatch, legally and fairly, within six months is significantly harder. That requires clarity about what good looks like in your business, documented performance standards, and a probationary process with genuine structure, proper review milestones and clear communication throughout.

A recruitment charter as a practical tool

We can help you build a recruitment charter that goes beyond the job description: defining the values, behaviours and ways of working you are actually hiring for, alongside the skills. Pair that with a probationary framework that protects your business under the new rules, and you are in a substantially stronger position regardless of how a new hire performs.

Neither of these needs to be onerous or bureaucratic. Done well, they improve the quality of your hiring and give you defensible options if things do not work out. Done poorly or not at all, they leave you exposed at exactly the moment when you have the least runway to recover.

Two things worth remembering

First, this is not a reason to stop hiring. Growth requires people, and the right people remain your most valuable commercial asset. It is a reason to hire more deliberately, and to manage more intentionally from day one.

Second, the businesses that contact us after a dismissal issue has already developed always invest more time and resource than those who got ahead of it. The cost of a good framework now is a fraction of the cost of a contested tribunal claim later.

Get in touch and we will walk you through what a practical, proportionate approach looks like for your business size and sector.