What is an exit interview?
Also called: exit survey, leaver interview
Last updated
An exit interview is a conversation or survey with an employee who is leaving, to understand why they are going and what the organisation could do better. It usually covers the reasons for leaving, the role, management, development and pay, and its answers are most useful when they are recorded consistently and reviewed for patterns.
In more detail
Leavers are often more candid than current staff, so exit interviews can show problems that engagement surveys miss: a manager several people have left, a pay band out of line with the market, a promise made at hiring that was not kept. The value comes from the pattern across many interviews, not from any one of them.
Most organisations hold the interview in the last week or two of employment, run by HR rather than the line manager so the person can speak freely, and record it in the same format each time so the answers can be compared.
Example
In a departing analyst’s last week, an HR partner asks her structured questions about her reasons for leaving, her manager, workload and development, records the answers and a rating for each area, and adds the main themes to the quarterly report on why people leave.
Exit interviews in CheckFlow
In CheckFlow the exit interview can be a step in the offboarding checklist, assigned to HR, with its questions as fields: drop-downs for the reasons and ratings, text fields for the comments. Because every interview uses the same fields, the Reports Grid lists the answers side by side, and they can be exported.
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