By Caroline Forsey

To determine what causes employees to leave — and to create a better, happier employee experience moving forward — it’s critical you conduct productive exit interviews.

In this post, you’ll learn everything you need to know about exit interviews, plus the best questions you should ask. We’ll also go over an exit interview form template that you can copy and paste into a document and reuse for future interviews.

What is the purpose of an exit interview?

The purpose of exit interviews is to get valuable insight from employees who are leaving your company. When conducted correctly, these interviews tell you what, if anything, could improve about your company culture. You’ll then be able to improve moving forward and drastically reduce employee turnover.

Why are exit interviews important?

According to a study conducted by The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), on average it costs a company between six to nine months of an employee’s salary to locate and train a replacement for them. So if the employee who’s leaving makes 60K, that can work out to anywhere between 30K and 45K in recruiting and training costs.

Undoubtedly, a high turnover rate can hurt your company financially. Additionally, a high turnover rate can lead to less productive teams, and lower employee morale overall.

Luckily, you can reduce turnover rate by using the feedback you get from exit interviews. Many employees who are leaving can help you determine areas for improvement and provide valuable feedback. Additionally, it can be helpful to identify consistent patterns of discontent to figure out larger organizational issues.

For instance, let’s say you hire a new marketing director, and a year later, you see a severe increase in turnover rates. Out of 15 employees, only seven from the prior year remain. Undoubtedly, this change impacts your team’s productivity and morale, and leave you nervous about the future of your department.

So how do you figure out what’s going wrong, or how your marketing director can improve their performance to ensure higher job satisfaction for their team?

The answer is conducting an exit interview for every person who’s leaving. You’ll find out what your marketing director is doing wrong and help them improve in their leadership role.

You’ll also improve morale because you’ll show employees that you care about their experience. You’re not just letting people leave — you want to know why they’re leaving and stop anyone else from doing the same thing.

To ensure you’re asking the right questions during exit interviews, take a look at the questions you should ask below and what to look for in an answer.

1. How long have you been considering leaving our company?

This is a simple question that will tell you whether this was a rash decision or a decision that happened over time. If it seems sudden, then it was likely caused by a certain event, and you’ll be able to better tailor your questions to get to the motive behind …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron