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Pick the role, the country, and the start date. Get a dated 30-60-90 plan with the national holidays that fall inside your ramp window and an evaluation date that lands inside the statutory trial period.
Every other hiring tool answers a question you ask before the offer. This one answers the question that decides whether the hire works out.
Plan builder
Seven roles, eleven Latin America markets, and your own start date. Copy or download the finished plan as text.
Build your plan
The plan is placed on a real calendar, checked against the country’s 2026 national holidays, and timed so your evaluation lands inside the statutory trial window.
Day 90 lands on November 7, 2026. 8 of your 8 working hours overlap with a standard local day in Colombia. Full overlap. Your 9 to 5 Eastern day is 9 AM to 5 PM for the hire.
Your 90 day plan
What good looks like at day 90
By day 90 the assistant runs a defined set of recurring tasks end to end without you reviewing each one.
Success measure: Number of recurring tasks the assistant completes without a clarifying question, tracked weekly.
Where this role usually goes wrong: The common failure is under-delegation. Managers hand over small tasks, keep the judgment calls, and then conclude the assistant is not adding value. Assign whole outcomes, not fragments.
Before day one
Week 1: August 10, 2026 to August 16, 2026
Working, connected, and shipping something small. Access problems in week one cost more than any other week.
Days 8 to 30: August 17, 2026 to September 8, 2026
Producing real work under review. The goal is a correction loop that runs daily, not a training course.
Holidays in this phase: Assumption of Mary on August 17, 2026.
Days 31 to 60: September 9, 2026 to October 8, 2026
Owning defined areas with review at the edges rather than on every task.
Days 61 to 90: October 9, 2026 to November 7, 2026
Independent inside the agreed scope, and evaluated against the measure you set on day one.
Holidays in this phase: Day of the Races on October 12, 2026; All Saints' Day on November 2, 2026.
Evaluation checkpoint
Hold the formal evaluation on October 1, 2026. The statutory trial window closes on October 8, 2026. Hold the evaluation a week earlier so a decision to end the engagement still falls inside it.
Statutory trial period in Colombia: 2 months. The trial period must be agreed in writing and caps at 2 months for indefinite contracts. On fixed-term contracts it caps at one-fifth of the term, never exceeding 2 months. During a valid trial either party can end the contract without notice or indemnity.
Employer notice after probation: None (indemnity instead). Colombia has no statutory notice period for ending an indefinite contract without cause; the exit is priced through the Article 64 indemnity instead, and many employers simply pay and end the same day. Fixed-term contracts are different: skipping 30 days of non-renewal notice renews the contract for the same term.
Holidays in the window: 3 total, 2 on days your office is open
Planning baseline only, not legal advice. Confirm probation, notice, and holiday rules for the specific contract with qualified local guidance.
Why it matters
BambooHR research puts the average window at 44 days, and found 70% of new hires decide whether the job is right within the first month. A plan that starts producing value in month three has already missed the moment that mattered.
Gallup reports that only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job onboarding new people. The bar is low enough that a written, dated plan puts you ahead of most employers.
A local hire absorbs context by being in the room. A remote hire absorbs whatever you deliberately give them. Everything a plan would normally leave implicit has to become explicit.
Most hiring effort is spent on the part that ends when the offer is signed. Companies run structured interview loops, compare salary data across markets, model employer costs, and then hand the person a laptop login and hope. The uncomfortable part is that the sourcing work is the easier half. Whether a hire turns into a productive teammate is decided in the first few weeks, by whether they can do real work, whether they know what good looks like, and whether anyone told them when they were off track.
The research on this is consistent and slightly alarming. BambooHR surveyed 1,565 US full-time employees in 2023 and found that companies have an average of 44 days before a new hire has made up their mind, that 70% decide whether the job is right for them inside the first month, and that 44% report second thoughts about accepting the offer within the first week. Gallup, working from a much larger data set, reports that only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job onboarding new people. Put those together and you get the practical conclusion: the window is short, and almost nobody uses it well.
That is the opportunity. Onboarding is one of the few parts of hiring where a modest amount of structure beats most of the market, because most of the market has none. A written plan with dates, an agreed definition of done, and a feedback conversation before day 21 is not sophisticated. It is simply more than the alternative, which is a new hire guessing at priorities while waiting for permissions to be granted.
What this adds
Pick a start date and every phase gets calendar dates you can put into invites. Day 30 stops being an abstraction and becomes a meeting on a Tuesday.
Every 2026 national holiday inside your 90 day window, flagged when it falls on a working day your office is open. Those are the days a ramp plan quietly slips.
The statutory trial window differs by country from none at all to 180 days. The builder sets your review date inside it, not after it, when the decision gets expensive.
There is no shortage of 30-60-90 templates. What they all share is that they know nothing about your hire. They do not know that the person starts on a Monday in September, that their country takes an independence week that month, or that the trial period in their labor code closes on day 30 rather than day 90. Those three facts change the plan more than any amount of generic milestone wording, and all three are knowable in advance.
The builder above takes the role, the market, your time zone, and the start date, then produces a plan that accounts for them. The milestone content differs by role, because a software engineer and an executive assistant fail in completely different ways. The calendar differs by country, because national holidays are not a rounding error when four of them land inside one month. The evaluation date differs by labor code, because a review scheduled after the trial period closes is a review you cannot act on cheaply.
The shape of the plan
Access verified, working hours agreed, and one small piece of real work completed. Everything else in the plan depends on this week not being wasted on setup.
Real tasks with a daily correction loop, the first written feedback conversation by day 21, and the first payment confirmed as landing correctly.
Review moves from every task to the edges of the work. A structured mid point review against the measure you set on day one, in writing.
Work that requires coordination rather than instruction, the formal evaluation inside the trial window, and the next quarter's scope agreed in writing.
By the numbers
44 days
Average window before a new hire has decided (BambooHR, 2023)
70%
New hires who decide job fit inside the first month (BambooHR, 2023)
12%
Employees who strongly agree onboarding was done well (Gallup)
Sources: BambooHR, First Impressions Are Everything (2023) and Gallup, Why the Onboarding Experience Is Key for Retention.
The trial window
In the United States, at-will employment means the timing of a performance review is a management choice. Across Latin America it is not. Most labor codes define a trial or probation period during which ending the relationship is simple, and after which it is priced through notice, severance, or both. The length of that window is the single most consequential difference between onboarding plans in the region, and it varies enormously.
Mexico is the clearest example of why the detail matters. Article 39-A of the Ley Federal del Trabajo sets a trial period of up to 30 days for an ordinary indefinite contract, extending to 180 days only for management roles and specialized technical or professional work. If you hire a coordinator in Mexico City and schedule the first real performance conversation at day 45, the cheap window has already closed. If you hire a senior engineer into a role that qualifies for the extension, you have six months, and a day 90 review is a checkpoint rather than a deadline. Same country, same start date, completely different plan.
The other end of the range is Argentina, where the trial period now runs to six months following the 2024 Ley Bases and the 2026 labor modernization law. Several markets sit at the opposite extreme and set no statutory trial period at all, pricing every exit through severance instead, which means the protection you want has to be written into the contract rather than assumed from the code. The table below is the planning baseline the builder uses.
| Country | Statutory trial period | Employer notice after probation |
|---|---|---|
| Argentina | 6 months | 1 to 2 months |
| Brazil | 90 days | 30 to 90 days |
| Peru | 3 months | None (indemnity instead) |
| Costa Rica | 3 months | 1 week to 1 month |
| Dominican Republic | 3 months | 7 to 28 days |
| Ecuador | 90 days | None (indemnity instead) |
| Colombia | 2 months | None (indemnity instead) |
| Guatemala | 2 months | None (severance instead) |
| Mexico | 30 days (180 for specialized roles) | None (severance instead) |
| Chile | None | 30 days or pay in lieu |
| Uruguay | None (90 days by practice) | None (severance instead) |
Planning baselines drawn from national labor codes, not legal advice. The probation and notice tool carries the full rules for each market, including the formalities that have to be in writing for a trial clause to hold.
The calendar
A 90 day plan assumes roughly 64 working days. National holidays in the hire’s country come out of that number, and because they are not your holidays, they are invisible on your calendar until the day someone does not appear at standup. This is not a small effect. A window that includes Semana Santa, Carnival in Brazil, or a September independence week in Mexico, Guatemala, or Chile can lose four or five working days from a single month.
The direction that surprises people more often is the reverse one. Your US office closes for Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July; your hire in Colombia or Peru does not observe either. Unless you extend those days to them, they are working while nobody is available to answer questions, which is a poor use of week six of a ramp. Deciding this before the start date, and writing it into the working agreement, avoids an awkward conversation the week of the holiday.
The builder lists every national holiday inside your exact window and marks the ones that fall on a weekday when a US office would normally be open. Use that list twice: once to move milestone dates that would otherwise land on a day the hire is off, and once to agree explicitly which US holidays, if any, your hire also takes. The 2026 public holidays tool has the full year for each country if you are planning past the first quarter.
Roles
The reason generic onboarding templates underperform is that they treat the failure mode as universal when it is not. An engineer who cannot build the project locally loses two weeks to setup. An executive assistant who has the calendar but not the context optimizes your week and damages a relationship. A support hire judged on ticket volume in week two learns speed before accuracy and keeps that habit. Each of those is a real, specific, preventable outcome, and none of them is addressed by a milestone that says “complete training”.
| Role | What good looks like at day 90 | How you measure it |
|---|---|---|
| Virtual assistant | By day 90 the assistant runs a defined set of recurring tasks end to end without you reviewing each one. | Number of recurring tasks the assistant completes without a clarifying question, tracked weekly. |
| Executive assistant | By day 90 the assistant protects your calendar, prepares your meetings, and closes loops you never see. | Share of your meetings that arrive with an agenda and a prepared brief, and hours of unstructured time protected each week. |
| Customer support specialist | By day 90 the specialist resolves the majority of incoming tickets alone and escalates the rest with a useful summary. | First contact resolution rate and the share of escalations that turned out not to need escalating. |
| Software engineer | By day 90 the engineer ships to production independently and reviews other people's code with useful comments. | Time from first commit to first independent production deploy, and pull request cycle time by week 12. |
| Sales development representative | By day 90 the representative books qualified meetings from their own pipeline without a script review on every message. | Qualified meetings booked per week, and the share of those meetings that the closer accepts as qualified. |
| Bookkeeper or accounting support | By day 90 the bookkeeper closes the month with a review rather than a rebuild. | Days to close the month, and the number of correcting entries found in review. |
| Marketing coordinator | By day 90 the coordinator runs the publishing calendar and ships campaigns without you approving each asset. | Share of the publishing calendar shipped on schedule, and the number of assets that needed a second revision round. |
How to use it
Build the plan before the offer is accepted rather than after. Two things come out of doing it early. First, you find the access problems while there is still a week to fix them, which is the difference between a hire who ships something on day one and one who spends week one filing IT tickets. Second, the plan becomes something you can share during the final conversation, which is unusually persuasive to a strong candidate. Very few employers can show a new hire exactly what the first three months look like, and the ones who can tend to win the candidate.
Then agree the working hours before the start date, not during week one. The overlap number the builder shows assumes a standard local day, and for most of the region that already covers the majority of a US workday. If your role needs live coverage in a specific window, say so up front and set the schedule as part of the engagement. Renegotiating someone’s hours in month two, after they have built a life around the first arrangement, is the kind of avoidable friction that costs good people. The time zone overlap calculator models this for your exact zone and market.
Share the plan with the hire on day one and put the review dates in both calendars immediately. A plan the manager keeps privately is a checklist. A plan both sides can see is an agreement, and an agreement is what makes a mid-course correction feel like normal management rather than a warning. When something slips, and something always does, the conversation starts from a shared document instead of from a disagreement about what was expected.
Finally, treat every question the hire asks in the first month as a documentation gap rather than a knowledge gap. This single habit compounds. The answers you write down for the first remote hire become the onboarding material for the second, the third, and the tenth, and the ramp time falls each round. Teams that hire steadily in the region tend to find that their fourth hire is productive in half the time of their first, and almost none of that improvement comes from hiring better people.
Who does what
It is worth separating the parts of onboarding that a staffing partner can carry from the parts that cannot leave your building. LavaStaff Managed Hire handles payroll and compliance, directly or through a vetted EOR partner, along with sourcing, vetting, and the employment relationship itself. That covers the contract, the trial clause, the statutory benefits, the holiday entitlement, and the payment landing on the right date in the right currency, which is the infrastructure most US companies would rather not build country by country.
What stays with you is everything in the plan this tool produces: the context, the access, the definition of done, the feedback, and the decision at the evaluation checkpoint. No provider can supply those from outside your company, and any provider claiming to has misunderstood the problem. The practical move is to share the finished plan with your provider before the start date so both sides know which milestones depend on which party, and so the compliance dates and the management dates sit on the same calendar.
Questions
It is a written plan that says what a new hire should be learning, doing, and owning at each stage of their first three months. The first 30 days are about access, context, and small real work. Days 31 to 60 are about producing under review. Days 61 to 90 are about owning a defined area with review only at the edges. The value is not the format. The value is that both sides agree in writing on what good looks like before the work starts, so a mid-course correction is a conversation rather than a surprise.
Three things change. First, nothing is absorbed by proximity, so context that a local hire would pick up by overhearing has to be deliberately written down or said out loud. Second, the calendar is different: your hire observes their country's national holidays, not yours, so some of your working days are days they are off, and the reverse is also true. Third, the employment rules are their country's rules, including the trial period, which is 30 days in Mexico for an ordinary role and up to 180 days in Argentina. The builder above handles all three by placing the plan on a real calendar with the country's holidays and trial window marked.
Before the statutory trial period closes, with about a week to spare. This matters more than most US employers expect, because ending an engagement inside the trial window is usually straightforward, while ending it after the window closes triggers notice, severance, or both, depending on the country. If the trial period in your hire's country is 30 days, a day 90 review is far too late to be a decision point. The builder sets the evaluation date from the country's trial window rather than from a generic template.
It depends entirely on the country and the start date, which is exactly why a generic plan misses them. A 90 day window that includes Semana Santa, Carnival, or a September independence week can lose several working days that a US calendar shows as ordinary. The builder lists every national holiday that falls inside your specific window and flags the ones that land on a weekday when a US office would normally be open, so you can plan the ramp around them instead of discovering them.
Every account, tool, and permission the person needs to do real work, tested by someone who logged in as them. This sounds obvious and it is the single most common failure. An engineer who cannot build the project locally for two weeks, or an assistant waiting on mailbox delegation, spends the highest motivation period of the engagement waiting. Set the access up the week before, verify it works, and give the person something small and real to complete on day one or two.
For most support, operations, and coordination roles, three months of structured onboarding gets someone to independent work inside a defined scope. Engineering and specialist roles often reach independent delivery in the same window but take longer to reach full context on a complex system. The variable that moves this most is not the person, it is whether the work is handed over as whole outcomes or as fragments. A hire given complete tasks with a clear definition of done ramps considerably faster than one given pieces of tasks that still require the manager to finish them.
The split is worth agreeing in writing before the start date. LavaStaff Managed Hire handles payroll and compliance, directly or through a vetted EOR partner, along with sourcing, vetting, and the employment relationship. What stays with you is the part no provider can do from outside: the context, the access, the definition of done, and the feedback. The plan this tool produces is the part you own. Share it with the provider so both sides know which milestones depend on which party.
No. The trial period and notice figures shown are planning baselines drawn from national labor codes, and the holiday dates are the 2026 national calendar for each market. Governments move holidays by decree, collective agreements add their own rules, and the exact treatment of any one contract depends on its terms. Use this to plan the ramp and to know which questions to ask, then confirm the specifics with qualified local counsel or through a provider that carries the employment relationship on your behalf.
Ready To Move
LavaStaff sources, vets, and launches Latin America talent that works your hours, with payroll and compliance handled. Share the role and we will bring you a shortlist.