Why conduct Exit interviews?

• To learn why individuals are leaving, thus giving you the opportunity to potentially take action and prevent other talented individuals leaving for the same reason
• (If appropriate) to potentially change an individual’s mind about leaving, if conducted early enough in the process

Most people give the following reasons for leaving – job dissatisfaction, pay and career development, recognition and poor man management. As the job market tightens we recommend that you ensure exit interviews are conducted in case action needs to be taken.

Top Tips

• Produce a pro forma/questionnaire and use it for all staff to ensure consistency. Ensure you include some questions that require the individual to rate areas so that you can produce stats for comparison purposes
• Send out the questionnaire in advance so that individuals can consider their responses in advance or complete it in order to get more detailed responses
• Conduct the meeting as soon as possible. If you are losing a particularly valued member of staff, this might be an opportunity to reverse their decision, whereas if left to their last week of employment, it might be too late
• At the beginning of the meeting, ask the individual to confirm what they are happy to be fed back and to whom, i.e. agree the level of confidentiality
• Ensure the exit interview feeds into other processes such as employee surveys, ensuring questions have similar themes in order to compile meaningful analysis/plans of action
• Take action once the interviews have been conducted i.e. feedback to appropriate people and measure the results of your actions
• Ensure they leave feeling valued. Just because they are leaving, it doesn’t mean to say that they won’t come back or even become a future client