Dealing With Hard to Work With Employees

Hey All -

I have an employee on my helpdesk team that's been here for 2 years and started out great. He was learning quickly and following our documentation very well. Over the past year or so though, I'm not sure what happened. I've been coming at him from different angles trying to get back on the same page, but it feels impossible. I don't want to go through trying to get rid of him, but I am at the point that I've been starting to get everything in writing because he causes me more stress and work than anything else. If I talk to him about ANY ticket in person, I now have to go update the ticket about what we talked about. When we talk in person, I have to follow up with an email about the talk. It's just so much more busy work that is bleeding into my real work and causing me to have to work more every week to get everything done. Here are some lists is of issues and examples, I'd like any sort of recommendation on how to help get him back on the right track.

• Argumentative - When working with him on things he doesn't have much experience with such as GPOs or Intune, he'll argue with me or my admins when they try to show him how to do things. I believe in his eyes he doesn't see it as arguing, but thinks he's just asking questions. However, how he communicates makes a simple 5 minute task and learn into some 30 minute back and forth of what ifs being asked by someone that doesn't know enough about the technology to be asking the what ifs yet.
• Can't take ownership - On every task I give him he is updating me every 15 minutes on anything new he finds asking for more direction. I keep telling him to just put everything in his ticket and we will talk about it when he has everything compiled. Yet he continues to do this. He'll even ask for direction on tasks he's already done a million times in 2 years and that is clearly documented. I really believe many of these events have been him being passive aggressive. But I have called him out on it and he denies he was being passive aggressive.
• Picks up any ticket that seems "complex" - Any ticket he sees that's harder than plugging in a keyboard he tries to grab. This overloads him and he stagnates on tickets. I then have to go back through and reorganize tickets from him to others on the team. I have spoken with him many times about this. Any task he doesn't already have knowledge about the technology, he calls "projects". Something as simple as auditing our 5 macbook MDM policies he'll call a project thinking that means spending 5+ hours on it is fine. Again, I have talked to him about this many times.

I could go on, but I feel like I'm starting to rant at this point. I'd rather help him get back on track rather than putting him on a PIP, but it seems like every effort I make changes nothing. My current effort is I have set his yearly goals to be all about soft skills such as how his communication can be perceived by others. I'm trying to find some 3rd party training for this, but I really don't have much confidence in him changing. Even in the meeting about this years goals he started arguing with me about my observations.

Is it time to talk to HR showing the receipts and put him on a PIP or does anyone have any suggestions on anything else I can try before going down that road?