I feel very silly starting this thread, but hoping for a bit of advice and guidance from someone more experienced than me.
I work in a team of 40 - decent m/f split skewed more towards men and a wide range of ages including a lovely man who should have retired a long time ago! We're all working from home for obvious reasons.
I have limited experience line managing people. I have line managed a couple of interns and someone twice my age for 3 months on an interim basis. All was fine, they were nice and compliant.
Earlier this year we took on a grad - the lad seemed great in the interview and super keen at the start. But now it's getting tricky for a number of reasons which I'm getting suspicious over. I was very open to him being new and needing to learn but now I'm not sure and I wonder if he's taking the piss. Working from home isn't helping matters. I am on the verge of scheduling meetings at the start and end of the day but I loathe micromanagement with a passion so I'd rather avoid this if possible.
He has appalling attention to detail. I will give him feedback only for him to only partially address what I said, or repeat the same mistakes in other pieces of work. Entry level stuff like punctuation as well as some more complicated stuff. The last piece of work he did I gave so much feedback on that it got embarrassing and I ended up finishing it myself to ensure we met the deadline.
He does not ask for help. E.g. I asked him to format a document and he didn't do it. When I pressed him as to why, he admitted that he didn't know what I meant and couldn't answer why he didn't ask me, any of the rest of the team or just bloody Google it, although I held my tongue on this point. In general we'll discuss what needs doing at weekly 121s and he will go yep yep yep all clear and fine no worries, understand... Only for basic mistakes to re-occur.
The suspicious part of me is wondering whether he's slacking off and being a bit useless on purpose?
He also has a very loosey-goosey approach to being at work. He started logging off earlier and earlier, when I pulled him up on it he said "well Bob logs off early" — Bob is a psychopath who works through lunch and eats one meal a day and is irrelevant here. He now logs off on the dot but I notice that he will be "away" or "inactive" on Skype for 5-15 minutes many times a day and takes a while to respond to messages. This is always because he was "reading" something 
I should say that the person he is replacing flounced because they did not get a promotion they felt they deserved, so I feel under pressure to make this "work". The end of his probation period is coming up as well and I don't want to face another failure.