Our sales team wants to dismiss a new hire at the expiry of his probationary period. Are there any issues that we need to be aware of?

Generally speaking, employees can be dismissed with relatively little risk during the probationary period as an employee can, save in certain limited circumstances, only bring a claim for unfair dismissal if he or she has one years’ continuous service. However, notwithstanding this, there are a number of important questions that should be asked before the decision to dismiss is made as follows:

a)     Does the employee have one years’ service? When calculating the employee’s length of service, it is important to include the employee’s notice period as that the notice period is included for the purpose of calculating length of service. For example, if an