Making exit interviews a hands-free process

When an organization has a high employee turnover, you know something is wrong there. Companies that take their work and employee management seriously will take measures to figure out the reasons for the churn.

Conducting exit interviews with departing employees is one of the best ways to get to the bottom of the problem and find a way to solve it. Employee exit interviews can help reduce the attrition rate.

A research data from the Harvard Business Review suggests that many companies don’t even engage in exit interviews. Many others that do merely collect information but don’t actually analyze it or fail to act on the data collected through exit interviews.

However, exit interviews are not something people are very fond of. In plain terms, the process sucks - just like separating couples who take out their bitterness on each other during divorce settlements.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. There are many things you can do to make your exit interviews smooth-sailing and less awkward. Identifying the right kind of technology to facilitate the process is usually a good start.

An employee exit interview is a final chance for employers to understand why people quit their jobs. An exit interview is face-to-face and upfront, which makes it a good source for gathering objective information. The responses to employee satisfaction surveys are cautious and sugar-coated because respondents are influenced by either confirmation bias or the fear of consequences.

Exit interviews, on the other hand, tend to be honest. Since the departing employees are free from consequences, their responses tend to be candid and blunt. Although the exit interview process shouldn’t be the first attempt to figure out problems related to a company’s attrition, it is a handy process that identifies the pattern in employee churn.

The common employee exit interview questionnaire contains a wide array of questions, and a few of them are very specific to organizations. The answers to these interviews reveal a lot about the people’s attitudes and their motive to move on to greener pastures.

If you, as an HR person, are wondering about what to focus on your exit interview process, consider the following questions as pointers:

These questions might look like a no-brainer, and yet, it is absolutely imperative to cover them. It’s better to keep these questions as specific as possible to get clear, specific feedback that will help your company improve your future hiring strategy.

While exit interviews are great, the HR department often comes across certain scenarios that create roadblocks from making the most of this opportunity. Some of them include:

With a little bit of intelligence, you can design a neat, hands-free exit interview for employees that improves your existing employee engagement efforts. Here are a few tips on how to equip your HR to create a great exit interview:

An automated exit interview app can guarantee confidentiality, make the employee off-boarding process more formalized, save the HR department a ton of administrative time, and work as a repository to reflect back on.