In today’s economy, skilled employees are the asset that drives business success. In a competitive job market, it’s more important than ever to retain your top talent.
A well conducted exit interview can give a wealth of information that can help improve retention and recruitment as well as increase motivation and engagement.
Here are our top 3 tips for conducting your exit interviews:
- Trust
The objective of an exit interview is to gather reliable and insightful information that can generate positive change within your company. Achieving transparent feedback can be tricky if there is no trust between the interviewer and interviewee.
There’s an old saying that “people join organisations and leave managers”. So having a line manager conduct exit interviews of their own leavers is never a good idea. The question always must be “who is most likely to get to the truth?”
Outsourcing exit interviews to an independent company has many benefits – not least increasing the sense that information will be treated confidentially and sensitively.
- Timing
Exit interviews need to take place in the “window of opportunity” – either shortly before or shortly after leaving.
Too soon and the employee might fear living with the possible aftermath of a difficult conversation during their notice period. Too late and the problem could be that they decide their experience is already water under the bridge.
- Structure
Structure plays an important role in exit interviews, how they are conducted could mean the difference between receiving results you can act upon and ones you can’t.
Multiple interviewers conducting multiple unstructured interviews can yield a “soup” of data that’s hard to consolidate and difficult to interpret. Plus, the interviewer may miss out on critical areas.
A formal structure gives consistency, just as in general recruitment interviews across an organisation are similar and follow a certain pattern and structure. The secret is a consistent framework, whilst still giving skilled interviewers the freedom to pursue lines of enquiry rather than just following a set script.
You can find more about the importance of structure here.
Exit interviews and the results you get from them rely heavily on how, when, and by who they are conducted. By employing our services to manage the exit interview process for you, ensures that you get truthful answers that lead to useful insight.
We’ve been working with a number of clients looking to improve and/or outsource their exit interview process. We are happy to share what we’ve learned and offer some ideas. Just drop a note to info@chiumento.co.uk or give us a call on 0207 224 3307.
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