Choose Your Interview Format
Giving your departing employees a questionnaire to fill out could be less time-consuming and help avoid some uncomfortable discussions. However, conducting a face-to-face exit interview has some benefits:
- You show that you care about your employees opinions by dedicating time to listen to what they have to say.
- You get the chance to have a less structured conversation that could result in unexpected feedback.
- You can end things on a personal, positive note.
Keep in mind, though, that your exit interview wont succeed if people feel forced to participate. Offer them an alternative like a questionnaire or a phone interview after they leave, if that makes them more comfortable.
There are many tools to help collect and analyze employee separation data. You can use tools like Culture Amp, E-exit interview, Beyond Feedback and Grapevine to customize your questions and spot trends.
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‘my Boss Was The Worst Because ‘
Lynn Taylor, a national workplace expert and the author of “Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant: How to Manage Childish Boss Behavior and Thrive in Your Job,” says you must remember that just because you’re not speaking directly with your boss, doesn’t mean you should lose your cool or make any last-minute snarky comments.
“By being too honest about your manager you can shoot yourself in the foot if you ever want to return to the company, or expect a good reference from that boss,” she says. “Remember to keep your comments general, concise, and make them overall positive.”
Use Of Online Insyncs Exit Survey Portal Vs Phone Based Exit Interviews
All of our clients use our online Exit Survey portal but some also select phone based exit interviews. The portal has online survey functionality, allowing respondents to complete their exit interview privately from their own computer. Some of our clients also use Insync Surveys trained exit interviewers to conduct phone based exit interviews. While phone based exit interviews are more costly, they can increase response rates and they can enhance the depth of responses as the exit interviewer probes for further information. By having a third party conduct exit interviews over the phone, the departing employee is also often more candid. We then type verbatim comments collected in the exit interview into the clients portal, so everything is online and accessible to administrators.
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Review Your Answers On The Sheet
When answering or filling up the exit interview forms, most people would usually jot in their information and boom! The person then submits it directly to the human resources representative without a second thought about any errors that he or she might have made.
Most people will do this for various reasons. They might not want to stay in the company anymore, or they are in a hurry. Circumstances. However, one must be mindful of practicing reviewing. The process is essential to clean up grammatical errors still evident on the form. Do this process and incorporate it whenever you fill up any document.
Who Does A Recruiter Work For And How Do They Get Paid

A recruiter is primarily working for their client, the employer. This can be hard for some people to understand as recruiters need to look out for the best interests of both their clients and candidates.
But at the end of the day, their client is the one with a position to fill, and a recruiter will be looking for the best person that fits their criteria.
As recruiters are working for a company, the company is the one who will be paying their fees. Fees differ between agencies, industries, and types of roles. Fees are calculated as a dollar value or % of a candidates first years salary.
A recruiter only gets paid if they find the perfect person for the role and remember, the client always makes the final decision on who they hire.
What is important to know is that a candidates salary should never be affected by that fee. A salary range for a position is set based on a companys salary structure for that role.
A recruiters fee is a completely separate entity from that salary range.
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What Does An Interview Entail
- Answered 14 March 2021 – Lead Generator – Cape Town, Western Cape
Nothing you just go and sit in on a group interview.
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Ask Questions And Pay Close Attention In An Exit Interview
You will want to listen carefully to what you are told in an exit interview and make sure that you ask a lot of questions. This will help ensure that you are hearing what the employee is saying and what he or she is not saying, which are both important. It is easy to make a leap of faith and assume that you understand what the employee is describing, but the employee’s words may not accurately convey the employee’s true feelings.
During an exit interview, being attuned to the employee’s subtle differences in meaning is crucial to the usefulness of the information you receive. It’s also best to write down what the employee says because you don’t want to trust your memory. When you write down the responses that your exiting employee provides, the person receives the message that you care about the information that he or she is providing. This, in turn, may allow you to collect more information and feedback than you otherwise may have received.
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What Made You Decide To Leave This Organization
While it may be tempting to list every single thing that made you want to leave your job, your HR officer does not want to know that someone kept moving your food or that your work neighbor made too much noise.
Highlight one or two practical reasons that impacted your decision. These reasons could be personal development, financial, flexible working hours or simply that your new workplace is closer to your home.
With this question, your HR representative is trying to establish if your leaving is because of:
- Abuse of power
- Personal reasons
Example Answers
The main reason I decided to leave was that I felt not enough attention was given to employee development. One of my personal goals is to be in a managerial position by the time I am thirty. My new role includes mentoring and goal-setting.
Having discussed promotions and salary increases with you previously, I believed that this organization could not give me what I am looking for. I have very much enjoyed my time here and am thankful for everything I have learned. However, I felt I needed to be at an organization that provides more.
Why Companies Conduct This Type Of Interview
An interview at exit is generally conducted by your companys human resources department, who is interested in finding out why youre leaving. What most companies want to take away from such an interview are your professional, constructive comments about the work environment and ways they might be able to improve it in order to retain future employees and help them to be productive and satisfied. The HR manager or job supervisor in charge of such an interview will likely present you with some paperwork to complete. You are also likely to be given an opportunity to share some of your thoughts about what it was like to work for the company and why you are choosing to leave.
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Exit Interview Tips: Planning Your Survey
Unlike an engagement survey where you deal with constructs built around employee attitudes, an exit survey should be much more practical and simple to design and interpret. If your exit interview questions are too general and open to various interpretations, you may want to consider redesigning your survey.
It can be useful to include a few open text field items within your exit survey questions too these often elicit richer detail and more nuances about an employees decision to leave compared to multiple-choice questions.
While historically qualitative answers have been difficult to turn into insights, text analytics software has come a long way in recent years. Natural language processing and sentiment analysis now allow you to automatically analyze tens of thousands of open-text responses and create topics, themes and trends to allow you to spot patterns and interpret the data.
Engaging Staff To Respond
A third party impartial exit interview process will provide exiting employees with an opportunity to candidly and honestly provide feedback across a range of key cultural and performance dimensions. For organisations the exit interview process will be a means to identify key concerns from exiting employees and capture their primary reasons for leaving. Achieving a high participation rate in an exit interview is essential to ensure validity of data, however impartiality of a third party provider and the opportunity to provide feedback alone are not always enough to gain support from departing employees to participate.
In Insync Surveys experience, best practice suggests that effective administration is crucial to ensure the successful capture of data in an exit interview.
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Based On Your Experience As An Employee How Can Our Organization Better Serve Customers And Clients
Once you gather information on the employeeâs personal experience and long-term career goals, ask this question to learn more about how they view the organizationâs value proposition.
Does the employee believe in the products and services? What has the employee learned from any direct contact with customers and clients, including things that managers and HR specialists may not be aware of?
How Well Your Job Was Structured And If You Had The Appropriate Tools To Succeed

To what extent was your job meaningful and motivating, allowing you to do the work you most enjoy? Did your manager create opportunities for you to use your strengths? Youll also want to share the extent to which you felt your manager supported you and helped clear obstacles, and whether you felt like you had had the appropriate resources to do your job well. These include things like budget, people, and other tools, such as the appropriate software to make your job easier.
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What Qualities Do You Think We Should Look For In Your Replacement
Question fourteen dealt with skills. Question fifteen deals with qualities. Yes, the job may have changed from one that focused on phone communication to one that focused on written communication . But it also may have changed in regard to some of the softer qualities like patience, people skills, and organization.
Asking the outgoing employee what qualities you should look for in her replacement is an excellent indication of this change.
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Come Armed With Facts And Be Specific
King says a lot of exiting employees go into the interview and rattle off a list of complaints about the company. She stresses the importance of having concrete examples of where things went wrong, rather than general grievances.
HR professionals are looking for feedback in exit interviews to be as specific as possible, using factual statements to describe your time at the company.
For example, rather than simply saying you didn’t get along with your manager, King suggests taking it a step further and letting HR know exactly when and what went wrong. What was the point at which your relationship with a manager eroded? Was there a policy you found inappropriate or exclusionary? Was a particular event that made you want to leave?
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What Is An Hr Meeting
Staffing Requirements The human resource department supports an organizations goals by recruiting, hiring, training and managing employees to fill roles in the company. Professionals working in the human resource department conduct and lead meetings with prospective employees, current workers and management staff to create strategic plans and meet the needs of the company. Staffing Requirements Human resource managers work with managers in various departments in an organization to determine the companys staffing requirements. The human resource professionals determine the companys staffing needs using sales forecasts and input from department managers and supervisors. Human resource managers must develop a strategic plan to recruit and hire employees with the skills and experience the organization needs to meet the company goals. Interviews Human resource professionals meet with prospective employees to assess the qualifications and skills of potential new hires. An employment interview is an opportunity to meet with an applicant, discuss the duties of the job and company benefits, and go over the individuals resume or application.
Types Of Questions You Should Include
As you can see from the above, these interviews can bring incredible value to your company. However, to do so, they need to be executed properly by asking consistent and relevant questions. The following are types of questions you could include:
- What was your main reason for leaving the company?
- Why did you ultimately accept the new position?
- Satisfaction ratings for the following: Induction, Training, Career development, Promotion opportunities, Business Culture, Work Environment, Pay & Benefits
- Did you fully understand your role?
- Did you have the necessary equipment to undertake your role effectively?
- Was the volume of work reasonable?
- What was your job satisfaction level
- Did you require sufficient support from your seniors?
- How were your relationships with your colleagues?
- Should the business make amendments to the role as it currently stands?
- Have you ever encountered any issues in your role?
- What could have been done to encourage you to stay in this role?
Creating and implementing an effective exit interview survey can appear challenging and time-consuming at first. However, the information gleaned from such research will be priceless to the retention rates of invaluable employees and ultimately the growth of your business. So, if you need help with your exit interview preparation or any of the related topics such as Learning & Development, employee retention and company culture, please do not hesitate to contact us now on: 01453 297557 or send an email to
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Reasons Why They Left
Yes, it is not a good idea to downright ask people why they are leaving. But that doesnt mean that you cant try to identify the root of the cause. Here are some exit interview questions that help you do so:
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What Companies Ask At Exit Interviews
Typical exit interview questions include why you are leaving, why you decided to accept a new position, your likes and dislikes in the office, whether you would change anything about the company, whether you would recommend the company to others, and what suggestions you might have for improvement.
Here are exit interview sample questions that you might be asked:
- Why are you leaving your job?
- What were the most important factors in your deciding to take a new job? Salary? Benefits? Time off? Something else?
- Were you satisfied with your salary?
- Was the company’s benefits package sufficient?
- Is there anything your new company offers that this company doesn’t provide?
- What did you like best about your job?
- What did you like least about your job?
- Was there anything especially challenging that you had to contend with?
- What would you change about your job?
- How did you feel about the supervision you received?
- Did you receive enough training to do the job effectively?
- Did you receive enough support to do your job effectively?
- How do you feel about the feedback you received from your manager?
- What did you like best about working for the company?
- What did you like least about working for the company?
- Do you have any recommendations for the company for the future?
- Would you work for the company in the future?
- Would you recommend this company to prospective employees?
- What advice would you give your replacement if you could?
- Do you have any questions or comments?
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If Something Illegal Happened Don’t Wait Until The Exit Interview
A lot of people try to avoid conflict or uncomfortable conversations at all costs. Sometimes this means holding onto information about something inappropriate or possibly even illegal happening in your workplace.
I can’t tell you the number of times that it’s a shocking bit of information I learned through an exit interview that I would’ve 100% addressed immediately.
King says the exit interview isn’t the ideal time to surface these situations for the first time. Rather, tell someone at the organization if anything happens that is against the law, discriminatory or that constitutes harassment so they can deal with it sooner rather than later.
“Don’t wait. Do it right away. It’s such a common mistake for exiting employees to assume that HR or management is aware if something illegal happened,” King says. “I can’t tell you the number of times that it’s a shocking bit of information I learned through an exit interview that I would’ve 100% addressed immediately.”