Quick Summary
- Exit interviews are structured conversations with employees voluntarily leaving a company, designed to uncover the real reasons behind their resignation. These insights often relate to company culture, job satisfaction, and work environment, and can inform retention and recruitment strategies.
- Conducted properly by HR, exit interviews reveal key issues and opportunities for improvement, helping reduce turnover and improve employee engagement. The cost of losing an employee includes training investment, recruitment expenses, and potential productivity loss—making exit interviews a valuable tool for minimizing these impacts.
- Successful exit interviews depend on timing, approach, and interviewer, and when done well, they support positive offboarding and stronger retention.
What are exit interviews?
In its simplest form, an exit interview is a face-to-face conversation with an employee who is decided to leave the company (voluntarily by resigning and not via redundancy) to discover the main factors that have driven their decision to leave.
In reality, it is often a potent mix of factors, not one single element, that has brought them to the point of resignation. These factors often relate to company culture, job satisfaction, or the overall working environment.
Done correctly, they can really inform your employee retention strategy and potentially inform future recruitment, improving overall employee engagement.
Why hold an exit interview?
The Truth
By conducting structured, probing, and independent exit interviews with departing employees, ideally facilitated by an HR representative or someone from your HR department, you’ll find out more about why people are leaving.
Exit interviews can uncover what’s really going on within your business. They allow you to quickly and easily identify which areas are of the most concern and therefore need addressing first, which areas are potential quick wins, and which will need a longer-term approach to improve.
Acting on that information will help to improve retention and create a real impression that you are keen to learn and improve — using specific questions to gather honest feedback and constructive feedback from those leaving.
The Cost
The true cost of a resignation can be eye-watering. Firstly, you are about to lose all the investment you’ve made in an employee. Induction, training, development, mentoring, coaching – all that investment is about to walk out the door.
Then there’s the cost of hiring a replacement. Agency fees, advertising, HR and line management time – it all mounts up. And then there’s the risk you can’t find the right future employee.
Effective interviews have the power to stem the tide of leavers. Helping you develop a focused retention strategy based on a deep understanding of why people are choosing to leave your organisation and supporting a positive offboarding process.
Exit interviews and the results you get from them rely heavily on how, when, and by who they are conducted. 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.
