Exit Interview Question Ultimate Guide 2022

 – Exit Interview Question –

It is quite a sad experience seeing your staff submit a resignation letter, having to bid your loyal employees goodbye in almost the same way you welcomed them in. Stick to this article as we assist you with exit interview question. 

What is an Exit Interview

An exit interview question, or exit survey, taken at the end of an employee’s time with you is the best way to find out why people leave your organization.

An exit interview is a series of questions you ask employees who are leaving your company.

You can identify trends, learn from them, and take action to reduce attrition, such as more robust hiring strategies or improvements to your company culture and management role and styles.

It’s a chance to learn from former employees’ experiences–the good and the bad. We can conduct the process face to face, using forms, or with an exit interview survey.

Exit survey questions provide valuable information to your company such as why the employee is leaving.

How happy they were with the salary, benefits, leadership, culture, and what they liked least about working at your company.

How Does Exit Interview Help?

Since the hiring process is expensive and can take a long time. If at the end of the process, you employ people who stay with your company only briefly, then:

‣ You only wasted time and money on recruitment

‣ Every time someone leaves your company, a bit of the company’s knowledge or process goes with them

‣ Leavers may also be the detractors, affecting your company reputation

By providing your departing employees with the opportunity to give sincere feedback, you can then gather valuable insights to improve the employee experience for both current and future employees.

Typically, only about a third of employees leaving an organization complete the exit interview.

Given the potential richness of exit information, all employers would benefit from encouraging every leaver to respond to exit surveys.

Since An exit survey is a means to an end. The goal is not to prevent the employee from leaving. Instead.

It is to learn and use it to gain insights to help keep talent, prevent bad hires, improve management practices, and ultimately drive better organizational performance.

It really pays dividends in the long run to invest time, energy. And care into finding out why people are leaving, in order to minimize future attrition.

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What are the Goals of an Effective Exit Interview Question or Survey?

An effective exit interview yields valuable information:

‣ Formally closes an employee/employer relationship in a mature and constructive and helpful

‣ It provides first-hand employee experience data on their environment, team, management, role, and company culture.

‣ Help discover if the former employee would promote your organization to other people.

‣ Understand why they left, so you can see how this aligns with your company’s attrition risk profile.

‣ Identifies any other issue or areas within the business that need

The exit interview survey format is commonly used to make the best use of remaining time. And support flexibility for a mobile, remote or international workforce.

Exit Interview Template

Unlike a traditional or other engagement surveys where you analyze constructs built around your employee’s attitudes, an exit survey should be much more practical and simple to design and interpret.

Different exit surveys can gather different feedback. Some ask for direct feedback or response on the leaver’s manager, while others just ask about the role and reasons for leaving.

It uses open text fields to elicit rich detail and implications about an employee’s decision to leave, as well as multiple-choice questions.

A text analytics software can automatically process language and analyze sentiment to allow you to gain insight into what your exiting employees would really think.

You can create topics, themes, and trends to help you spot patterns in the data.

What to Say in Exit Interview

Here are guides on what to say in an exit interview:

‣ Have a clear purpose, stated right at the beginning: This helps us understand more about your decision to leave’

‣ Thank the employee for their service: ‘We sincerely appreciate the work you’ve done with us this far, and we’re sorry to see you go!’

‣ Encourage open dialogue by making using of online surveys, which result in more candid feedback (as well as useful data) than a more traditional face-to-face interview

‣ Don’t shy away from asking tough, deep questions, particularly ones that shine a light on potential breakdowns within your business.

‣ Understand the impact of that attrition by correlating data from different sources. For example, by tying in your exit interview data with 360 performance data or employee engagement data, you can identify regrettable and non-regrettable attrition.

‣ Track trends over time so you can measure improvements and link them to KPIs such as staff turnover costs, to prove the return on investment (ROI) of your improvements

‣ Pinpoint certain teams, roles, or demographics with higher attrition rates

How to Gain Maximum Insight from Exit Interviews and Surveys

The following are tips on how to gain maximum insight from an exit interview:

1. Make the exit interview part of the standard off-boarding process and use automated systems to reduce the workload.

2. Conduct the exit interview after employees decide to leave, but just before physically leaving the organization. Employees are less likely to respond to the survey once they have walked out of the door.

3. Keep employee exit interview question short and simple by focusing on evaluating different job components and identifying where change is necessary.

4. Think carefully about interview questions involving feelings and emotions as this is difficult, especially if you have let an employee go.

5. Assure the respondent that their feedback would be seriously treated as confidential. It is not to be shared directly with their manager. And also you emphasize it will not affect any reference they may seek in the future.

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Exit Interview Question and Answer

Here are some exit interview question and answers:

Process Improvement Interview Questions

Process Improvement Interview Questions

1. How long did you work in this role?

Turnover among long-serving employees, who have accrued knowledge and skills. They have a greater impact than the loss of a relatively new hire.

There may be specific trends or issues prompting resignations among valuable current staff.

2. How accurate was the role described to you before you joined the organization?

Assess your hiring, interview, and onboarding processes. Also the role they played in selecting the right candidate. This can also yield data about the job description’s.

3. How much did the job role change after we hired you?

Certain circumstances may require an employee to take on new or different responsibilities.

Find out what these are and the impact they had on the employee by asking them what changed and why.

Workplace Improvement Interview Questions

Below are some questions considered on workplace improvement 

4. How reasonable or unreasonable was the workload for this role?

Burnout and overwork can be a factor in unwanted turnover.

A business could be over-estimating an employee’s capacity for more work. If they’re seen as high-performing top talent.

5. What were the best and worst areas of your job?

Each employee values different areas of a job, and it may help to understand this employee’s perspective to see obvious patterns.

It can promote good aspects to keep the role interesting.

6. How could we have supported you to continue in your role?

There may be potential areas (poor IT systems, lack of training or tools, etc) that weren’t working in the employee’s role.

Help keep your next hire by resolving these issues for a better experience.

7. Given the role’s responsibilities today, what things should we be looking for in your replacement?

No one knows the job better than the employee that did the job day in, day out.

Their insights can help you update the job description and target the right replacement candidates.

8. Would you consider coming back to work in this role in the future?

Rehiring an outstanding employee could be an option if the problems get fixed.

Find out whether they are still open to this role and want to hear about future opportunities.

The Pay and Package

Questions on pay and package:

9. How fair did you feel we could compare your compensation package to other organizations?

This question helps you understand whether you’re competing well in the wider employer market.

Maybe the employee enjoys working for you but has received an offer that’s too good to refuse.

10. How good or bad was your benefits package?

Pay is a contributing factor to employee dissatisfaction. Some other things like low engagement and alignment of personal values with company values, can matter more.

Track to what extent pay and the package played a role in the decision to leave.

11. Which benefits did you take advantage of?

Understand why an employee used some benefits over others, and where making changes could help benefit uptake.

This also helps strengthen your benefits for current and new employees.

The Reason for Leaving

Question concerning your reasons for leaving:

12. What was your main reason for leaving the company?

Sometimes, the best way to find out why somebody left is simply to ask them.

Employees know their own minds about resigning–intent to leave and actually leaving strongly correlated.

13. Why did you look for another job?

We phrase this to focus on the employee’s wants and desires within the new position.

If they’re looking elsewhere for this, you might bring it to your company.

14. Was there a specific event or person involved with your decision to leave?

50 percent of Americans have left a job to “get away from their manager in their career”, according to a Gallup employee engagement survey.

If employees are resigning because of a direct cause, this needs immediate attention.

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The Managers

Below are questions you should ask regarding the managers:

15. How much did your managers’ actions match their words–ex? Did they do what they said they would?

An employee’s relationship with their manager can have a huge impact on their engagement and job satisfaction. Trusting your manager to follow up on what they say helps support a good working relationship.

16. What challenges were present when working with your manager?

An employee’s upwards feedback can help strengthen the management of your replacement hire. It can also highlight when to explore training options or review performance levels. This is a very important question when considering exit interview questions.

17. How were feedback and ideas exchanged and did you feel it worked?

Employees that receive constructive feedback and can suggest ideas back can feel valued and supported. As they progress in their role, employees feel greater job satisfaction.

Team Members

Questions concerning your team members:

18. What was the team atmosphere like?

In an exit interview questions, the dynamics within a team are unique. Based on each person’s personality, role, and background. This gives you an idea of the overall picture of the employee’s team and how they work.

19. How often did you see your team or have team meetings?

Team collaboration can impact an employee’s job if there is no adequate opportunity to arrange meetings and connect. Managers can review practices to structure team contact time each week.

20. Who made a real difference to your employee experience, if anyone?

There are some employees within teams that naturally hold teams together and attempt to help others. These employees are worth knowing and appreciating for making their team better.

21. What advice would you like to give to your team?

The advice from the employee could point to a viable or innovative solution. As advice framed positively, it’s more likely to be constructive and helpful.

Company Culture Interview Questions

The questions below are about the company culture:

22. How safe or unsafe was your working environment?

Employee safety and how it perceived within a company culture can have strong positive or negative effects on employee engagement—which by the way is a driver of retention. It’s essential employees feel safe.

23. How would you describe the organization’s culture?

Your view of the company culture at a senior level can vary from the staff working on the ground. See if the cultural values are also clear, or if more needs to be done to establish them within the business.

24. Who would you speak to in the organization about your concerns?

Explore how connected the employee was and who was in their networks. It will also show well your staff is communicating with each other at a peer-to-peer level, and where this is not happening.

25. Have you ever experienced any discrimination or harassment within the workplace?

Harassment and discrimination are serious offenses that must handle correctly to protect the organization and employees. If the employee experienced issues, find out why this went.

26. On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?

This question supplies employees NPS data, which provides insight into loyalty and engagement. Engagement, in particular, negatively correlated with staff turnover, so investigating that could change.

27. How fairly or unfairly do you think this company treats all of its employees?

An employee’s perception of organizational justice can impact the likelihood of turnover—if the perceived level of justice is low, it could be a factor to consider.

Exit Interview Toxic Workplace

These questions to ask to tackle toxic workplace:

28. What would you change about the company?

You’ll find more information on why the departing employee is leaving, or gain the employee’s unique perspective of the company from their interactions with customers, suppliers or other peers.

29. Where does the organization perform well?

Areas perceived as positive enough to warrant complimenting by a departing employee are likely to be shared in a positive light in the future. Verify the results and explore these ‘gems’ in more detail.

30. How can we improve our training and development?

Maybe the employee enjoyed learning in a specific way or using a specific training option. Or did they learn outside of the training on offer? This could improve the way we deliver the training.

We believe this article has been of great help to you if your company is suffering from employee attrition. With the sample exit interview question in this article, you can create one specifically for your own firm.

Do well to share with your friends so they can be aware and reduce employee attrition. 

StudentsandScholarship Team.