Exit Interviews

[Ms_HR]

Hi All,

what are people using as exit interviews?

we currently have a form with open-ended questions and is not helping at all with capturing the information we are after?

what to create a nice and simple quick form that everyone can fill out....is anyone using something similar?

[Just a Dude]

Ms HR,

I have read your post a few times tonight, and keep asking myself. What is the information that you are after?
It sounds to me that you have a pre-conceived notion of why an individual has left your organisation, and your exit interview, is a tool to re-inforce those notions. You may want to be open minded. I am sure that your using the right questions, most exit interviews are pretty straight forward.
In the organisation that I work with, they have a basic questionaire setup consisting of 5-10 'seed' questions (depending on the persons position). It comes down to the person conducting the interview to extract any further information they feel relevant.

[Ms_HR]

I am all for being open minded to people's responses. Am still wanting to maintain an open ended comments section, however it is very hard to report trends when analysing "free" responses.

Just wanting to catergorise reasons for leaving eg, work environment, employment conditions, health etc

Other areas we currently look at are:
communication with management
quality of leadership
wrok environment
work/life balance
company policies
departmental improvement
feedback for manager
fairness and equality
skill and knowledge development

Am also aware that most people don't want to be filling out a 5 page form so want to try and condense the exit interview to allow people to fill out the form quickly but also capture the information that we would like to report on.

[SteveR]

Ms HR,

I would be happy to send you a copy of our Exit Interview form which captures all the info you are after backed up with a conversation with the departing individual.

I'm not sure how to send you an attachment?

Kind rgds
Steve

[jba]

Exit interviews can be one of the greatest learning tools ever for a HR person coming into a company. Its way more than airing a lot of dirty washing . The style you employ to bring out the positives and negatives depends greatly on the circumstances and chemistry and to a certain degree i have usually been somewhat impromptu ,following different paths as we go through the interview.
The important part is to remember that there is always a positive and a negative channel to explore and to attempt to devote equal amounts of energy drawing on those two themes.

[kevinh]

Originally Posted by SteveR

Ms HR,

I would be happy to send you a copy of our Exit Interview form which captures all the info you are after backed up with a conversation with the departing individual.

I'm not sure how to send you an attachment?

Kind rgds
Steve

Steve, if you're willing to make it publicly available please submit via the document upload form on this page and we will put it in the document repository.

Regards,
Kevin

[Micky_Jay]

Where I used to work they had a reasonable exit interview tool. It was given to all terminating employees to complete if they wished (with a pre paid envelope). There were generally two types of responses 1) the angry employees with a beef with the organsiation 2) the happy employee who didn't really want to leave in the first place. It left the data open to interpretation with the middle ground having to be interpolated from the other information.

But to answer your question, the form had a number of good questions including:
Reason for leaving - this had about 15 options including the "other". This gave a good under standing about why people were leaving including study, travel, better pay etc.
List 3 reasons why you liked/disliked the job/organisation - this forced the person to think of positive and negative responses
Questions about expectations prior to starting and upon separation - in other words, what did you think you were in for, and did that happen
A series of questions about orientation, training and support recieved - generally more helpful for the shorter term employees, but gave evidence of whether the organisation was supporting the employees

Plus a number of other questions that gave the employee scope to vent or praise.

I guess once you have the information, the 2 big questions are how often do you look at the specific and general problems and do you act on these issues. It is one thing to have the Exit interview data, but another to actually use it to improve the workplace.

Another point to note is that the organisation that I worked for was reasonably large and could form trend data from the exit interviews. Smaller organisations might not have enough data to form trends.

[cam]

There is a new edition to the document repository in the form of a nice staff exit survey.

http://www.hrbuzz.com.au/vb/local_links.php?catid=9

Thanks Steve!

[Renee Muir]

Hi Ms HR,

We have developed our own online exit interview tool using our in-house Org Psych's.

I might be biased given I work for the company (Onetest) but results are speaking for themselves in terms of the effect this has had on our retention...in asking the right questions, at the right time and in the right format we've been able to extract a lot of key data that has influenced our retention strategies.

We now onsell this to other companies too. Our Psych's wrote a white paper about the tool not to long ago - click here if you are interested.

Otherwise, there is more info available on our website.

Hope this helps

Renee Muir

[evelino]

Hi There

Can anyone send me or attach a sample exit interview report?
Basically I need to submit a report to the management team with results of face to face exit interviews I have conducted.
Im finding it hard to come up with a professional layout. Can any HR Professional help me???

Cheers
E

[People Person]

Hi there,
Can someone tell me if they actually do anything with trends/data gathered from Exit Interviews? I've been a contract HR Advisor for 15 years and never had experience of an organisation doing anything with the data/trend information. It just "sits" somewhere - in a spreadsheet or in paper files - even when there are worrying trends pertaining to particular persons or departments with high turnover.