With regard to the increasing competition in the talent market, recruiters are looking for more and more new ways to attract and retain the best employees. They, however, o disregard exit interviews that come up when an employee actually leaves the company. Nevertheless, exit interviews may be a fundamental long-term source of information for recruiters and employee development specialists. A successful exit interview strategy is based on four pillars.
1. Timing
Hold exit interviews one or two days before an employee leaves. Employees will have their working issues resolved by that time and they will not have to worry about possible penalties for their honesty. Some sources even advise to hold exit interviews a few weeks after an employee left. The employee will have enough space to organize his thoughts and you can expect him to be more open and focus on really important things. The risk of this approach is, however, that the employee can be dissociated from your company to the extent that he will not be interested in talking to you any more.
2. Purpose
Employees will be more willing to talk to you if they know the purpose of exit interviews and can believe that their views will be used to improve the running of the company. This requires a clear process of integrating the results of exit interviews to the processes of strategic HR planning. Prepare examples of changes that were implemented in the company thanks to the feedback obtained during exit interviews for the departing employees.
3. Anonymity
If you allow employees to respond anonymously, you can expect truer results. Especially in large companies, anonymous online questionnaires or interviews lead by experts from outside the company work very well.
4. Reporting
The results of exit interviews must be processed so that it is possible to act specifically according to them. It is ideal to inform key managers/decision makers of the results at regular intervals, such as quarterly. You will then be able to track long-term trends and to better convince managers to change.
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