by Ruaidhri Horan, Marketing Manager, Abrivia Recruitment
Workers who are about to leave your organisation are a great source of information and an exit interview is an excellent way to collate this information. If you are experiencing a large churn of staff, this is a huge cost to your organisation and to not ask the real reasons, either though an informal interview or a questionnaire could be considered folly.
The 3 main advantages of exit interviews are as follows:
1: Weaknesses in your business are easily identified.
If there is a common theme which keeps appearing in exit interviews, this should ring alarm bells and the culture of your organisation may have perturbed employees from bringing up these weaknesses prior to their exit interview.
2: Increase staff retention.
Although you may not be able to prevent a person leaving, you will be given the information to help prevent others leaving. For example, you may discover that all your competitors offer remote working 2 days a month for their staff. Work-Life balance is becoming increasingly important for employees and this may be the simple carrot which encouraged employees to look elsewhere. If you were to offer something similar based on this information. You could greatly reduce employee churn and consequently make significant savings for your business, as staff retention reduces hiring cost.
3: Discover the Organisations Real Culture
When you are an employee and receive a “feedback questionnaire”, you don’t want to be perceived as a moan so generally your answers will reflect that “everything is rosy in the garden”.
Moreover, employees tend to be more honest in an exit interview and you will get to know the true culture in your organisation, warts and all. Culture is what your employees do when nobody is looking. You may need to address certain cultural traits which are not keeping with your corporate values statement.
Exit interviews are an excellent cost-effective method of capturing why people are leaving your organisation. This information gives you, as an employer, to implement a plan of action to increasing staff retention, saving your company thousands of euro as a result.
