Anytime top talent leaves your organization, it’s important to find out why. After all, it’s in your best interest to keep you best performers in your workforce, and if they are leaving because of some internal issue, you will want to get it resolved as quickly as possible. That is why the exit interview is so important. Even an employee that has made the decision to leave will typically submit to an interview, and the insights they provide are usually revealing and valuable. If you are not already conducting exit interviews, it’s probably time to start. Here are just a few of the benefits:
Improve Your Office Environment and Corporate Culture
Even if top talent is leaving for reasons that have nothing to do with your company, their opinions of how well your company treats its employees are valuable. An exit interview can reveal what you are doing well, what you are not, and how things could be improved. Plus, the employee perspective often reveals details that HR staff and managers are not aware of.
Understand the Nature of Your Vacancy
When you are looking to restaff, you are looking for more than just a job title. The person you are replacing has a very specific set of skills and personality traits that together contributed to the overall success of your business. An exit reveal helps you get a better sense of what you will be missing once they are gone. It also helps you to survey the full scope of the departing employee’s responsibilities, which is important when you start reassigning them.
Identify Trends and Patterns
Individual exit interviews are valuable, but so is their accumulation. Over time, trends and patterns will emerge that will tell you a lot about why people leave your company. It is easy to let emotion get in the way of rational assessment when top talent leaves. Tracking responses in your exit interview gives you objective data that you can turn to instead.
Protect Yourself from Legal Threats
It’s more common than you would expect for legally thorny issues to come out in exit interviews. Knowing about these issues in advance helps the company to prepare an appropriate response, and take steps to isolate the incident. The consequences are always less when these issues come our sooner rather than later.
After you’ve conducted your exit interview, it’s time to analyze the responses and restart the recruitment process. Find resources to help you find the right replacement faster by working with the staffing specialists at Selectek.
