The exit interview template is essential for an organization to collect honest feedback from exiting employees and obtain insights into their experiences at the company.
These exit interviews provide helpful information about what went well and what improvement needs for employees. Organizations can use survey templates customized to their needs to provide a disciplined and complete approach to conducting exit interviews.
In this blog post, we’ll look at 9 effective exit interview templates that can help companies get honest feedback from an exiting employee and make smart decisions to improve employee happiness and employee retention.
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What is an exit interview template?
An exit interview template is a prepared questionnaire or series of star questions meant to obtain specific information during exit interviews.
It provides a framework for the interviewer to guarantee that key subjects are covered consistently across all exit interviews conducted inside the organization. An exit interview form template helps to standardize the process and ensures that critical information is recorded uniformly from departing employees.
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An effective exit interview template includes questions about the employee’s experience and reasons for leaving. The template can be customized to the organization’s specific goals and areas of focus. An exit interview form consists of several questions covering the following areas:
- Personal Information: Personal information such as name, job title, date of resignation, etc.
- Work Environment: Job experience and workplace environment, such as satisfying and challenging aspects.
- Communication: Relationship and communication with colleagues and organization.
- Career Development: Opportunities for professional and personal growth, training, and development programs.
- Compensation and Benefits: Employee satisfaction with their compensation package, benefits, and salary.
- Company Culture: Opinion about company culture, values, comfort, and environment.
- Work-Life Balance: Employee’s work-life balance, challenges, and observations.
LEARN ABOUT: Employee Satisfaction Survey Template
Why should organizations conduct exit interviews?
Exit interviews are important because they serve several objectives for companies. They enable the organization to detect patterns and trends in turnover, understand the variables driving employee retention rates, and make informed decisions to improve employee experience and employee engagement.
Meeting with employees is always a good idea, even if they have decided to move on. It’s all the more opportunity to know the reason and get to the bottom of it. Here we will learn why are exit interviews important for your organizations.
Information to make changes
Employees, during their exit interviews, provide candid feedback. You can use this information to improve your exit interview process and reduce at least one element that contributed to the employee’s departure. It may bring issues you might not be aware of to the fore.
Discuss obligations
Many organizations have certain clauses and riders in employee contracts, such as a non-compete clause. It is always better to discuss obligations, dos, and don’ts with the employee during their exit interviews; this helps reduce ambiguity and liability for both parties. You can also review important data storage, sharing, and security aspects.
Get pointers from managers
Employees may give information or pointers their seniors may not be privy to. You can always take these to the managers or hr department; this will help address concerns or bridge any necessary gaps. It can prevent further exits from a specific team or department.
Peaceful resolutions
Employees may leave due to bad managers or conflicts with seniors, peers, or subordinates. Exit interview can bring these issues or fights to the fore, inciting a blame game and disrupting the peace. Productive exit interviews can be an excellent avenue to resolve such problems and ensure the employee leaves positively.
References
Even if your staff members leave, they can always refer their friends and family to the organization as future employees if they love the organization and the people. Use the exit interview to get references and add a hiring channel. Many employees who quit return to their former workplaces after months or years.
9 Essential Exit Interview Survey Templates
Here, we will learn about 9 exit interview templates that you should follow if you want to conduct interviews in your organization.
QuestionPro Workforce
QuestionPro Workforce is a workplace and employee experience survey and analytics tool that gives significant statistics and insights about your employees that can assist you in driving the most effective type of change.
It is a global survey and research platform that provides a wide range of tools and solutions for creating, distributing, and analyzing all types of surveys, including exit surveys.
QuestionPro’s main goal is to provide businesses and researchers with new technology solutions that help them get useful insights and make data-based decisions.
Indeed
Source: https://www.indeed.com/
Indeed, launched in November 2004, it is a global search engine for job listings. With offices around the globe, Indeed is co-headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, and Austin, Texas. It is a subsidiary of Japan’s Recruit Co. Ltd.
The template stands out because it is extremely detailed and really explains why an employee would exit an organization. It considers the supervisor’s role, organizational benefits, perks, etc. It also has an open-ended question at the end for a departing employee to put in any additional points they may have.
The Employers’ Choice
Source: http://www.theemployerschoice.com/
Employers’ Choice Inc. is a consulting firm for Human Resources (HR) that employs highly qualified and experienced HR professionals.
This template stands out due to its fine balance of open-ended and close-ended questions. A balance like this is crucial to find the root cause of a problem and how it can be fixed. It also considers all aspects of the employee lifecycle, i.e., onboarding, training, to the actual exit.
Vanderbilt University
Source: https://hr.vanderbilt.edu/
Vanderbilt University is located in Nashville, Tennessee. It is a private research university and offers a wide range of undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees.
Their exit interview template has a considerable amount of open-ended questions. Organizations can run a keyword analysis on the open-ended texts to highlight key concerns. These are especially effective since employees can be clear about their feelings, concerns and how these could have been avoided or fixed.
University of Pennsylvania
Source: https://www.hr.upenn.edu/
The University of Pennsylvania, also known as UPenn, is a private Ivy League research university situated in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The university has 4 undergraduate schools and 12 graduate and professional schools.
The template is very effective; it has a lot of question types. There are rating questions, open-ended, and close-ended questions. The template also has sections that are very handy when it comes to isolating or uncovering problems.
Roger Williams University
Source: https://www.rwu.edu/
Roger Williams University, located in Bristol, Rhode Island, and founded in 1956, is a private liberal arts university. It is named after Roger Williams, theologian and Rhode Island cofounder. The university has an academic staff of over 480 and enrolls over 5,000 students.
This template is effective because it balances close-ended and open-ended questions. This balance is pivotal in finding problem areas and solutions to fix future occurrences.
Lead Quizzes
Source: https://www.leadquizzes.com/
LeadQuizzes lets marketing professionals create quizzes, hire questionnaires, and surveys to increase their lead flow and learn more about their audience.
The friendly tone at the beginning of the template sets the mood. It is best not to be upset and assume the worst. Many organizations fail to make or sustain that connection. Employees can always come back to the organization, and not every ex-employee left because something was wrong.
California Institute of Technology
Source: https://www.caltech.edu/
The California Institute of Technology, also known as Caltech, was founded by Amos G. Throop in 1891. It is a private research university in Pasadena, California.
The survey follows an intensive rating set of exit interview questions, considering various aspects of the job role, such as job satisfaction, compensation, benefits, work environment, personal development, etc.
Exit interview questions can be different from one business to the next. There are a few you should never ask, no matter what type of business or field you are in.
The University of Limerick
Source: https://www.ul.ie/
QS Stars independent assessors have awarded the university prestigious 5-star rankings. The rankings were for innovation and knowledge transfer, graduate employability, teaching, internationalization, and infrastructure.
The University of Limerick (UL) is situated on the west coast of Ireland and has state-of-the-art education and research facilities.
Their exit interview template is very concise and clearly enquires about the reasons for leaving. It also seeks info about the job role and satisfaction, key elements for reducing attrition.
It is believed over 50% of all global organizations face difficulty retaining their highly-valued employees. It brings us to the big question.
How do we contain staff attrition?
Containing staff attrition is quite important for organizations. It’s easier said than done, but here are some tips to limit employee attrition.
Hire wisely
Organizations hire for skill sets, overlooking the most important aspect that needs due consideration – whether the candidate fits the organization’s culture or not. Combining the two, a strong skillset + right cultural fit is necessary.
You can ask them organizational behavioral questions during recruitment to gauge their reactions and understand their mindset. It will not only help in knowing the employee but also help in building an effective career path.
A survey of over 1,000 workers found that 31% quit their job within the first six months of joining.
Recognize milestones and achievements
Your staff needs recognition and encouragement. Ensure you notice their efforts, hard work, and achievements and reward them when they exceed their core responsibilities. Promote their excellent work, and assign more duties. It not only creates a positive impact on the employees’ minds but also employee engagement.
A study suggests 70% of employees believe they’ll need to quit their organization to advance their careers.
Provide commensurate compensation
All employees desire to be compensated well, one of the biggest reasons for job switches. While it is impossible to please and satisfy all employees, what organizations can do is provide commensurate compensation.
Ensure it meets industry standards and has incentives and rewards for excellent performers. Organizations tend to save money by offering packages that may not be competitive but lose more when an employee leaves, and that void needs to be filled.
Studies suggest that replacing a trained employee costs upwards of 200% of their annual pay.
Provide benefits
Organizations must offer employees perks and benefits that meet industry standards. Today’s workforce has its expectations when it comes to benefits and perks. Some of your employees may travel long distances to work, while others may juggle many responsibilities.
You should be mindful of these and offer benefits such as working from home, a better workplace, and flexible hours to make employees happy. Financial wellness and health benefits, such as college loan management, dental care coverage, and health insurance plans, go a long way in arresting employee attrition in organizations.
Organizations with remote work facilities record 25% less staff turnover than those without.
We now understand some of the key reasons behind employee exits. It is crucial if organizations wish to contain the number of employee exits. Employees will still leave organizations to pursue other opportunities, and that’s alright.
You can, however, ask each of the departing employees their reason for leaving and use that information to make incremental positive changes in your people processes. Doing exit interviews is an excellent way to get that information. Not all organizations do it, but we say it is a must.
LEARN ABOUT: Employee Wellness
Best exit interview survey software and tool
Using QuestionPro Workforce to do exit interviews can be a good start. HR managers can use the survey tool and platform to conduct a productive exit interview, gather crucial departing employee data, and analyze it to make informed changes in the exit interview process. The key four uses or utilities of using an exit interview software or platform are as follows:
- Saves time: The tool comes with pre-set templates to send your current employees. You may modify the templates or create an entirely new one; both options are quick. The platform is user-friendly and saves a lot of time.
- Access control: When conducting employee exit survey questions, HR managers need to be mindful of privacy and anonymity. It means you may have to limit exit interview access for some people. These tools have settings and options to access certain people, ensuring privacy and security.
- Insights: Collecting valuable insight is only stage one. The next step is to gather insights and use that information for positive changes in your HR processes. These tools provide trend analysis, sentiment analysis, etc., to find the root causes of issues.
- Customization: Exit interview portals can be customized to match your organization’s branding, which lends credibility and improves the response rate of your exit interviews.
- Source of information: A well-written exit interview form will be a valuable source of information. Your customized exit interview forms will give the organization valuable insight that will help both current and future employees by collecting employee feedback online. A well-written exit interview form will be a valuable source of information.
Why use QuestionPro Workforce as an exit interview platform or software?
Online survey platforms are being embraced by organizations globally to conduct workplace culture and employee experience surveys. Online employee survey tools such as QuestionPro Workforce help HR managers connect effectively with the employees. It helps them gain information that they would otherwise not have or receive. Some of the benefits that online survey software offers are as below:
Easy usability
The platform or software is highly user-friendly and requires little to no training to start conducting surveys. It ensures that you send surveys from day one of using the tool. It comes with an existing set of human resource templates; you can use these and start conducting exit interviews.
Constant updates and customization
Organizations prefer using online survey tools as they have many features, and new features are frequently added. Not only that but many of these tools can also be customized to meet organizations’ specific needs and requirements. You can customize your employee portal to reflect your brand themes and colors.
Detailed analysis
This robust analytics software lets you track and measure your organization’s exit trends. You can also use the tool to track staff productivity, workforce engagement, employee morale, etc.
Informed decision making
You need data to evaluate and improve your interview process. Conducting surveys helps gather and act on that data to make informed decisions.
Companies that use QuestionPro workforce can streamline their exit interview procedures, acquire significant insights into employee experiences, and make data-driven decisions to boost retention, engagement, and overall organizational success. Contact QuestionPro today to conduct your exit interview survey!
