Conducting of a good exit interview
When an employee decides to leave your company, your first thought is likely to be about their replacement. Yet before you launch into the recruitment process, you could be missing out a really useful step towards growing your company’s success.
Exit interviews are one of the most reliable sources of information about the happiness levels of your employees, and one of the best ways of reducing employee turnover. While working for you, staff might not feel confident or comfortable enough to speak out about aspects of their role or the wider business that they have an issue with, but if they’re leaving they may be more willing to open up.
For honest feedback and powerful insights, take the time to ask a departing employee about what they did and did not enjoy during their time with you, and then use that information to drive your business forward. We’ve put together some exit interview questions to help you gather the all-important data.
Questions to ask in an exit interview
Why did you start looking for a new job?
As the first question, this opens the conversation up to the root cause of your employee deciding to leave. It may be as simple as them moving to another city, but if their reasoning is to do with salary, workload, progression or company culture, these are wider issues you need to know about.
Take a look at The Heat Recruitment 2021 Salary Survey to help you benchmark your employee salaries against the wider industry.
What made you accept your new position?
If the individual has found a new role elsewhere, it’s useful to find out what attracted them to it. This will highlight any limitations or shortcomings within your own company, while also giving you an insight into what other organisations in your industry are offering.
This will help you adapt and improve your job description to appeal to candidates, and allow you to stay ahead of the competition.
How would you describe the culture of our company?
There’ll be a variety of answers here, as it’s a very open question. If you receive a negative response, it’s important to identify which are the employee’s personal gripes and opinions and which are real concerns.
Over time as you conduct more exit interviews, you’ll start noticing trends in the answers you receive. These trends are key to addressing your company culture and leading it in the direction you want to go.
Did you feel equipped to do the job here?
This question will help you identify any gaps in skills or knowledge across your entire staff base. Knowing whether employees have the tools and resources they need to do their jobs effectively will shape the onboarding processes for new recruits, as well as training programmes for existing staff.
When your employees feel confident and supported, they’ll be more likely to stay within your company which will hugely reduce the costs of turnover.
Did you share your concerns with anyone in the company?
If the individual answers ‘no’, this could highlight a culture of fear and distrust around voicing concerns, which you’ll need to address immediately.
Alternatively, if the answer is ‘yes’, and this is the first you’re hearing about it, this indicates that managers are either not taking employee concerns seriously, or are not seeking out feedback. In this case, you need to talk to your managers and retrain them in how to handle staff complaints.
Did you feel like a valuable part of the company?
Employees who feel like they’re an important asset to your business, who are given encouragement and recognition, will be far more likely to stay than those who don’t. And if the staff member you’re interviewing doesn’t feel valued, it’s likely that other employees will be in the same situation.
If this is the case, it might be time to review some internal processes, such as your rewards and recognition scheme, flexible work arrangements, paths to progression and performance reviews. Catching the problems early will stop them developing into bigger issues that can’t be easily fixed.
Do you have any other comments?
Finishing up the exit interview with an open-ended question gives the departing employee a chance to say anything that hasn’t been covered by the previous questions. Listen carefully to this answer too, and if it uncovers a new problem, take time to understand it fully.
Exit interview tips for employers
- Send the questions over beforehand. To give the employee time to organise their thoughts and to create a structure for the exit interview, consider emailing over the questions before you meet and talk through the answers face to face.
- Don’t get defensive or angry. You might hear things about your company that you don’t like, but it’s essential that you stay calm and remember that it won’t be easy for the individual to open up to you. Be respectful and thank them for taking the time to speak to you.
- Record the answers. This will help you to identify trends at a later date, as if many exit interview responses mention the same issue, it’ll highlight a clear problem to fix within your company.
- Don’t try and convince them to stay. If you’re at the point of an exit interview, it’s probably going to be too late. If you valued them as an employee, you should’ve given them an incentive to stay earlier. Which brings us to our most important tip…
- Don’t wait until the exit interview to ask for feedback! A healthy and successful business rests on the happiness of its employees. Make sure to check in with them often, schedule performance reviews and have an open door policy to create a company that people want to stay in.
If you need any help or advice on organising an exit interview, our team would be happy to help.