The Benefits Of Conducting Exit Interviews
Its worth putting the effort in to develop your processthere are some impressive rewards that come from asking the right questions. Such as:
- Cost effectiveness: You can receive direct feedback from staff about issues in your business. Normally youd have to hold assessments or perform a business audit, which can cost a lot of time and money. Exit interviews are a quick and easy way to find issues in your infrastructure.
- Understanding employee turnover: Gain insights into the mood of your workforce, which can ultimately affect your business staff retention rates. In time, that can ensure you save on having to recruit more employees.
- Increase retention rates: Again, your leaving interview will help to identify ways in which your business can improve working life for staff. For example, making improvements to your work-life balance. Every improvement you make can increase staff happiness and encourage them to stay with you.
- Idea resource: From the information you gain from departing employees, you can get an understanding into initiatives and opportunities to provide across your business.
What Do You Think Are The Skills And Qualifications That Your Replacement Needs To Have
You are the person who knows best how to do your job and do it perfectly. Your employer might want your help in figuring out the attributes they should look out for when hiring your replacement. You can talk about the skills they needed when hiring you but which you rarely needed on the job or the skills they never mentioned but you needed to get the work done perfectly. This could help the company write a more accurate job description and hire someone fully capable of handling the job.
How Do You Feel About Management
Again, this is a question that should be answered honestly, but respectfully. Even without fear of repercussions, you should be mindful of how your message will be received and communicate with purpose. Dont just tell someone you dont like them, no matter how much you dont! Be constructive in your comments.
While most of us would have loved to tell an objectively awful manager in the past to *insert comment here* and slam the door on your way out, you need to be prepared for the fallout. Would burning this bridge be worth it? What does this accomplish, other than providing a short-lived and unfulfilling release of frustrations?
Even if you dont think its likely, consider that you might need a reference from this person at one point or another. Now think about your answer again!
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Sample Exit Interview Questions
Reasons for leaving your job
Sometimes it can be a challenge to verbalize your reasons for leaving. Research shows that the main reasons that people leave their jobs voluntarily are:
- For career opportunities that involve advancement and self-development
- A better work/life balance
- An improved fit with the company and job
- For more suitable management and leadership styles
- Availability of training
How Would You Improve Employee Morale
Just hours ago, this employee was in the thick of things. He was dealing with company culture and being influenced by others morale first-hand. Living through that on a day-to-day basis gives him unique insight into how that morale and culture can be improved. This is the time to find out what he thinks.
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What Not To Ask
While its important to be on alert for harassment or discrimination complaints or just bad management that your exiting employee may point out, you dont want to fuel the fire.
Exit Interviews should focus on the company, and the information you gather should be helpful, constructive feedback that you can use to move the company, employees and processes forward.
These conversations also give employees an opportunity to provide their opinions and share what led to their decision to leave. However, you need to be careful not to encourage negativity in any of the following ways:
1. Dont ask targeted questions about specific people or issues. While its OK to ask for general feedback about a supervisor, you should not insert your opinions into the conversation.
2. Dont feed office gossip. Its never constructive and wont be reliable information.
3. Dont say anything that could be construed as slander. The conversation should focus on the employees experience. Although he or she may have negative things to say about certain people, you should listen without agreeing or disagreeing with his or her point.
4. Dont lay the groundwork that could look like you are setting someone up for termination. Any employees performance and status within the company should not be shared especially with a departing employee.
5. Dont get into personal issues. Keep the conversation professional and work-related.
6. Dont try to convince the employee to change stay with your company.
What Did You Like About Your Time With Us
You might be asked this explicitly, but even if you arent its always a good idea to pepper in some positivity in your answers. Just keep it genuine!
Think about what stands out as unique to your workplace, especially aspects of your job that your boss or management directly contributed to. Your employers dont want you to dread coming in to work – if there was something that made the company worth working for, they want to know!
At the end of the day, employers want a mutually beneficial relationship with their staff where the job gets done well and the employees leave feeling satisfied. When you tell them what theyre doing well, theyre able to not only maintain that habit or policy, but enhance it!
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Exit Interview Questions To Ask
Losing an employee is hard. But an exiting employee provides your company with a chance to learn how to improve and reduce employee turnover rates. One of the last meaningful conversations youâll have with an employee is the exit interview.
What is an exit interview? How do you conduct an exit interview? What do you do when the interview is over? Discover exit interview best practices and questions you shouldâand shouldnâtâask.
Note: You can track the entire employee exit process, including the steps you should take if you would like to retain the employee, with a process map in Lucidchart. Get started now with this template.
What Exit Interviews Aren’t For
Know that the exit interview won’t solve all of the company’s problems, however. If you experienced more systemic, recurring issues, you can bring up how they impacted your decision to leave, but it may no longer be the time to get into the details.
“I don’t think exit interviews are the place to rehash something you know you had multiple meetings about and ultimately didn’t get what you were looking for,” Thomas says.
Leaving more general feedback in these cases could help you “protect your peace,” as Jay puts it. She cautions against going into the conversation angry and ready to bash your employer or colleagues. You never know if you’ll need them for a future reference she says. And even if you never intend to work with someone directly, it’s possible you could still be connected through the same industry, or have common connections that could impact your work.
“You want to make sure the majority of your relationships while you’re working are positive, and that people will say kind things about you when you’re not in the room,” Jay says.
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What Was The Biggest Factor That Led You To Accept This New Job
Of course, you dont need to feel pressured to share all sorts of details about the position youre moving on to. However, you should be prepared to hear a few questions along those lines. The people in charge simply want to get an idea of how theyre matching up with other organizations in the same industry.
Perhaps the pay at your new job is way better, and your employer needs to reevaluate its salary structure. Or, maybe something about the company culture really appealed to you. Whatever it is, sharing that information helps your employer to stay on track with its competitorssomething thats undoubtedly important when attracting new talent.
You Quit Your Job Now They Demand An Exit Interview What Do You Say
You just quit your job. In your final two weeks youll tie up loose ends, help train your replacement, clean out your desk and say your good-byes. Theres also a good chance youll be asked to attend one final meeting before you hit the road: the exit interview.
Before leaving most firms, the Human Resources department will ask you to meet with them to discuss your reasons for quitting, among other things. The purpose of an exit interview is to get the departing employee to divulge why she is leaving and how she feels about her experience with the company, says Alexandra Levit, the author of Blind Spots: The 10 Business Myths You Cant Afford to Believe on Your New Path to Success. Ostensibly, this provides data that senior leadership will use to improve things.
Departing employees might use this opportunity to be completely honest with their employersdishing out constructive criticism, berating or praising colleagues, airing grievances, or applauding the corporation for its do-gooding ways. Others, however, might be less candid. And it turns out there are pros and cons to both approaches. Three experts weigh in.
If you do disclose your thoughts and feelings, Canchola says you should steer clear of any profanity, racial or gender slurs, blasting individuals, departments or the company as a whole, and never state an opinion as fact.
But does it really matter whether youre tight-lipped or open with HR personnel? Will what you say make a difference?
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Your Reason For Leaving
This is fairly straightforward perhaps you were approached, unsolicited, by an executive recruiter with an exciting new role that was also a step-up in title and pay. Or maybe you are relocating to be closer to family or to support your spouses new job. Or perhaps you are burned out and need a break to reflect on what you really want in your career and life. This is helpful for the organization to know and can allow the exit interviewer to probe further in the appropriate areas.
Make The Most Of An Employees Departure
Departing employees are as much a part of everyday life as new ones. Businesses and people change, and a bit of change does everyone good.
Nevertheless, it is rarely an enjoyable experience when someone leaves. Structured exit interviews can help you to make the best of the situation.
You gain important insights on how to better retain your employees, and you get to part company with your employee on the best possible terms. Everybody wins, and for that reason, employee exit interviews are a must for every HR department.
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What Suggestions Do You Have For The Company How Could We Improve
From suggestions about management style, compensation and benefits to which snacks to stock in the kitchen, its important to consider all types of feedback. While you may not be able to make all proposed changes, knowing what employees find important will help you determine how to improve workplace morale and prevent other employees from leaving for similar reasons.
Sometimes They Can Be The Most Important Conversations That You’ll Have With An Employee
You can conduct exit interviews when an employee is leaving the business. With this process, you can aim to get an understanding about their reasons for leaving.
They also provide you with the opportunity to explore their experience of working at your business.
And that includes sharing insights into where they think you can improve on a daily basis. That might be with better HR software to make clocking in and out easieror simply by looking to improve the work-life balance.
Little things like that can really make a big difference.
In this guide, we take a look at how to introduce this process into your businessplus, the type of questions you should ask.
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Reflect On Your Experience In Writing
Its not always easy to wing a conversation, especially when you need to talk about something as difficult as why you chose to leave your company. Without proper structure, excessively harsh or critical statements might slip out, or you could forget something important you really wanted to bring up. To avoid something like this, its best to plan out in advance which items you want to cover.
I highly recommend writing down notes to plan what you want to say, advises Jude Miller-Burke, Ph.D., business psychologist and author. If you expect it to be highly charged, practice out loud. Reinforce to yourself that you will maintain boundaries and not succumb to your strong emotions.
Write a list of all the items you want to cover, including positive feedback, critical feedback and what you think the company can do to improve overall. You probably wont want to read off of this list verbatim in the meeting that could come off as a little stiff and impersonal just use it to help jog your memory around which topics to bring up and how to answer certain questions.
The Basics Of Exit Interviews
Most exit interviews are conducted in the privacy of an office or spare room. Generally they are one-on-one discussions between the leaving employee and employer or a HR staff member. For the purpose of privacy, if HR conducts the interview they may collect results from multiple exit interviews and share the feedback anonymously with the employer.
Unlike a job interview or intervention, the employee in question is not competing with other candidates or being investigated for misconduct, so you dont need to follow a formal structure or checklist. By keeping the process casual and relaxed, this will help the employee feel at ease and be more willing to provide honest feedback.
Try having the exit interview leading up to the employees last day. But dont suggest having the interview on their actual last day. At this point, the employee may be stressed and will want to bid farewell to close friends and colleagues.
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Questions To Expect During An Exit Interview
You will probably get hit with a couple dozen exit interview questions when you are leaving. Some common questions include:
- Why are you leaving?
- Was there a single event that caused you to leave?
- Is there anything we could have done to prevent your departure?
- Did you receive enough training, support, etc.
- Were you satisfied with your benefits package ?
- Multiple questions regarding management.
- Multiple questions regarding the company
Im sure every situation is just a little bit different, so it helps to think about why you are leaving the company and what you want to accomplish with your new company. If you have those goals in sight, answering your exit interview questions will be easy.
Interviewer Preparation For An Exit Interview
Exit interviewers need guidelines, just as job interviewers need and use guidelines. Interviews are inherently sensitive, emotional situations which require the ability and maturity to manage properly, especially if interviewees are anxious or volatile. Exit interviewers must understand that retirement is a traumatic experience for many academic professionals. The Montana State University Retirement Assistance and Exit Interview Process is an effort to make the transition to retirement as comfortable and rewarding as possible. A face-to-face interview facilitates knowledge transfer, suggestions, and candid evaluations.
Prepare for the interview. Identify topics for which the retiree has specific experience and knowledge. Employ conventional interview procedures such as: arranging a suitable time and place, avoiding interruptions, taking notes, being aware of body-language and feelings of the retiree and adjusting your approach as necessary. Let the retiree know that his/her time and effort are appreciated. Identify your action items, then follow-up and report back as necessary. Meet the established time line for analyzing and reporting exit interview information.
The following are suggestions for managing the interview:
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Exit Interview Template For The Uk
The design of this can be on a simple sheet of paperyou can create one on a Word document, for example.
The structure you can follow is up to you, but certain fields are important.
You can follow the below exit interview checklist sample:
- Employee name.
- Main reason for leaving .
- Your questions with space below for answers.
Its good business practice to use business letterhead paperalthough its not essential to do so.
