Throwaway manager here. I tried to keep a personality hire out of a PIP. It was a huge mistake. Turns out when all other options are exhausted, a PIP can be a form of respect. In the hands of the right manager, an underperformer gets one last clear chance to show they can do the job. If they succeed, some the ugly baggage gets put behind them. And if they can't succeed, then the PIP sends a message that they are unsu…
In good faith, the process makes sense, right? "You are not performing, you have been told if you do not change it will be a problem, you have not changed, this is formal notice you must change or you will be fired."
In bad faith, as others have described around this thread, it's just a performance around legal departments being risk-averse when most places in the US are at-will and you could fire them with 0 notice, so they're making a paper trail out of whole cloth with the outcome predetermined, so attempting to "work harder" to get out of it is just you giving a lot of effort when you're about to need to work really hard to find another job no matter what.