How to Conduct a Successful Exit Interview

Across the globe, 52% of employees are looking for or actively seeking a new job, according to 2023 data from Gallup. While an exit interview can’t change someone’s choice to hand their notice in, it can help uncover the reasons behind their decision.

This information allows HR teams to get a deeper understanding of what’s driving employee turnover. That makes it easier to assess whether changes need to be made to the company culture, policies, training, pay, and everything else that impacts the employee experience. And ultimately, these actions help improve the retention rates of current and future employees.

But to tap into those benefits, exit interviews need to be conducted in the right way. Here’s everything you need to know about how to make that happen and how HR tech can help. 

What is an exit interview?

Exit interviews are a constructive conversation between an organization and an employee who’s leaving. “The purpose is very simple,” said Debbie Nathanson, an executive coach, HR strategic business partner, and consultant. “You’re trying to collect data to improve the employee experience, to hear what’s working well and what’s not.”

The Importance of Exit Interviews

Exit interviews don’t just help organizations gather valuable feedback — they’re also a way to ensure departing employees feel heard and appreciated. Their opinions may be positive or negative, but meaningful feedback like this is a goldmine for human resources teams. That’s because this kind of data gives you a better grasp of what’s affecting your organization’s turnover.

Armed with this information, it’s easier to improve the employee experience, adjust company culture, and ultimately, impact metrics like engagement, retention, and performance. But to achieve these kinds of goals, the exit interview process needs to be as smooth as possible.

This also means HR teams can maximize the chances of employees taking part. In addition to a meeting with HR, offer a survey that employees can complete in their own time, using HR tech they’re already familiar with, like Lattice. 

Leveraging Technology for Exit Interviews

The feedback gathered during an exit interview can be incredibly valuable — but only if it’s acted upon. Using technology to support the process makes it easier to collect and analyze your employees’ thoughts and opinions, so you can concentrate on taking action. 

Creating a survey with Lattice helps you quickly capture detailed feedback before the formal exit interview. Then, Lattice Analytics can identify any trends in the data and provide valuable insights that help improve the employee experience in the future. 

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How to Conduct an Exit Interview

The more comfortable an employee feels during an exit interview, the more likely they’ll be to share their thoughts openly. The preparation you do in advance, combined with your ability to actively listen to employees’ concerns, goes a long way toward making these meetings a success. Here’s what to think about when planning how to conduct exit interviews at your organization. 

Who should conduct an exit interview?

Typically, HR conducts the formal exit interview. Many HR professionals believe managers shouldn’t be involved in the exit interview process at all, especially if the employee-manager relationship is one of the main reasons the employee is leaving.

But Nathanson isn’t convinced. “I think both [meeting with HR and with the employee’s direct supervisor] can work,” she said. Even if managers aren’t in charge of the formal exit interview, they owe it to their employees to have a chat before they leave. “I think managers — good managers anyway — are beholden to their employees to see if they are willing to share anything,” she added. 

The details employees share during these conversations can be extremely valuable, especially for larger organizations. “A discussion with a trusted manager may shed light on some of the broader corporate [issues] that are at play in their decision to leave,” noted Nathanson. 

For a well-rounded approach, have HR conduct the formal exit interview, but schedule time for managers to touch base with an employee before they leave, too. 

Send an exit interview form in advance.

Sending a survey or form before the exit interview can help encourage more honest and detailed feedback, as it gives employees a chance to think about what they’re going to discuss. Even when an employee is leaving a company, they may be hesitant to share their thoughts freely during an exit interview. 

“A lot of people remain politically correct during this process because they don’t want to burn bridges,” said Matthew Burr, an HR consultant and adjunct professor at Alfred State College. “But the only way the company can get better is through direct feedback.” 

A survey is the best way to collect this kind of direct, honest feedback, as employees often feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts without the face-to-face component of an in-person or video call meeting. 

As you create an exit survey, include a range of questions covering issues from training and responsibilities to manager effectiveness and company outlook. Lattice’s Employee Exit Survey Template includes questions on these topics and more. It’s also a good idea to include some open-ended questions where employees can add detail if they want to. 

The breadth and depth of information collected by surveys can be extremely valuable. For example, in an interview, an employee might say they’re leaving the organization because they weren’t paid enough. But a survey can allow you to dig deeper and ask the top five reasons they’re leaving. 

“This will probably provide much more interesting information,” Nathanson said. “If you can get more than one answer, you can start to see trends. What are the second and third reasons people are leaving?” For instance, maybe you find that 95% of employees who leave before the one-year mark cite “lack of training” as their number two reason. This level of detail can help your people team develop more comprehensive onboarding and training programs. 

Familiarize yourself with the employee.

Agreeing to an exit interview is a voluntary, generous gesture on the part of an employee. So it’s important that whoever conducts the interview shows their respect and appreciation, which will help facilitate more meaningful conversations. One of the best ways to do this is to brief yourself on the employee’s history before sitting down to speak with them. 

Key points to research include when they joined the company and in what position, plus how their career trajectory has progressed. But don’t stop there. Try to learn about any big wins, achievements, and challenges too. 

It’s also important to learn the tough stuff. Were they passed over for a promotion, or has their department experienced considerable turnover? Knowing these details can help you ask pointed follow-up questions to better tease out useful data. 

Be a good listener.

Your questions might be prepped — but an exit interview should be a two-way conversation. If an employee is leaving because they felt undervalued or unheard in their work environment, they may be expecting the same treatment during the exit interview process. 

But, the human resources department has a valuable opportunity to counter this by creating a safe space for employees to voice their true thoughts. “It’s important for the departing employee to share their experience, and a lot of employees want an exit interview for this reason,” said Nathanson. 

She also pointed out that many employees want to share their feedback because they care about their coworkers. “Maybe they want to highlight something great someone has done, or maybe they want to highlight something going wrong because they really care about their colleagues.” And an exit interview gives them the chance to do so. 

To make the most of this process, use active listening techniques like:

• Employing nonverbal cues like maintaining eye contact and open body language (avoiding folding your arms and crossing your legs, for example)
• Paying attention to nonverbal cues from the employee, for example, their expressions, tone of voice, and eye contact
• Encouraging detailed responses with open-ended questions like “Can you explain more about that?”
• Avoiding judgment and advice
• Asking additional questions if you need more information
• Paraphrasing what an employee said, to ensure you fully understand what they’re trying to say. For example, “So, one of the most challenging aspects of your role was trying to maintain a good work-life balance?” 
• Getting comfortable with leaving space for silence

Ask the right questions.

Exit interviews might be a formal part of the offboarding process, but you should keep them conversational. “You’ll learn a lot more if the exit interview feels like a conversation than if it feels like a questionnaire,” said Jessica Garrant, senior director of operations at Lucy Therapeutics. While a template can be extremely helpful for guiding the general framework of what you need to cover, look for opportunities to ask follow-up questions, too.

Garrant recommended using the same loose outline of questions but tailoring specific queries toward what the exiting employee is sharing. She starts by asking “Why are you leaving us?” If the employee says that they have a new job, you can then ask about the reasons that prompted them to begin looking.

“Many people today are leaving their organizations for different opportunities that aren’t solely limited to a new or better job,” Garrant said. “You hear all the time people saying, ‘I want to go back to school,’ ‘I’d like to pursue a career in another field,’ or ‘I’m going to be a stay-at-home parent,’ so I think it’s important not to assume.” 

Next, Garrant progresses to management-related questions, including:

• Do you feel your manager gave you the tools you needed to be successful? Why or why not?
• Do you feel your achievements were recognized? Why or why not?
• Do you feel you were offered growth and development opportunities? Why or why not?

Then, move on to role-specific questions. Some good questions to ask include:

• Do you feel like your job matched the job description? Why or why not?
• Do you feel like your job changed throughout your tenure with us? Why or why not?

Next, ask questions about the company:

• How do you feel about the company’s communication practices? 
• Do you feel like the company offered competitive compensation? Why or why not?
• What do you think of the company’s benefits package?

Questions about the company are important in their own right, but they can also be a useful way to balance out more difficult questions, like those about an employee’s direct supervisor. “I think it’s important to ask some of those bigger questions around benefits, company communication, and the tools the company provided because those are easy answers that make the person feel relaxed,” Nathanson said. 

After you’ve worked your way through your template, allow time for employees to share any additional thoughts. “Employees really appreciate being heard and feeling like what they have to say matters — especially if they felt underappreciated during their employment,” said Garrant. “So tell them directly: ‘If there is something you’ve been wanting to say or share, I’m here to tell you that we’d really like to hear it.’”

Interview Question Best Practices

Whichever way you choose to organize the flow of an exit interview, make sure to touch on the following points.

• Manager effectiveness: Some experts say it’s best to avoid asking about specific individuals or their manager’s effectiveness, but the ones we spoke to disagreed. “I think you have to ask about their manager,” said Nathanson. These questions allow you to uncover any potential issues around how managers approach communication, feedback, and career growth. 
• Succession planning: Two weeks is the standard notice period, but that’s usually not enough time to make serious headway in replacing an employee, especially if they hold a managerial position. An exit interview is the perfect time to ask about a potential replacement. “It’s always a good idea to ask them if they think there is anyone on the team who would make a good successor,” Nathanson advised. 
• Flight risks: Colleagues often talk more freely among themselves than they would with management or HR. If an employee is leaving because of challenges with their manager or frustration over company-wide practices, other employees are likely planning their exit, too. “You may not receive an honest answer, but it’s worth asking,” Nathanson said. The best-case scenario is that you get a tip-off about someone else who may be unhappy. This gives HR the chance to re-engage them before they choose to leave, she added. 
• Compensation: Nathanson, who spent much of her career heading up HR for big financial institutions, said you may not learn much, but you should still ask about salary. “I don’t think you can expect to get a very interesting answer because people who don’t want to disclose too much [as to why they’re leaving] will always say money,” she said. But perhaps that really is why the employee is leaving, and they may be open to sharing the details of their new compensation package. “Then you get a real chance to compare and contrast salary and benefits and ask honestly, ‘Are we paying people fairly?’” said Burr.

Promise confidentiality carefully.

To encourage departing employees to share their opinions openly, HR will often tell the interviewee that all information will be treated confidentially, and won’t be traced back to them. But it’s crucial to only promise this if it’s true. This is especially important at small companies where there are likely only a few people leaving at any given time. 

“At small companies, you can’t honestly look a departing employee in the eye and say, ‘No one will know this has come from you.’ That’s disingenuous,” Nathanson cautioned.

Rather than promising confidentiality if it’s not feasible, opt for transparency instead. Explain to the employee exactly what will happen to the data from their interview and who will have access to it. This way, they can make an informed decision about how much they feel comfortable disclosing. 

Use the data.

The ultimate goal of exit interviews is to improve employee retention. But for that to occur, the data needs to be analyzed and used to drive change. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen. “A lot of times it’s like organizations just want to check the box and say it’s done,” Burr said, and that’s a lose-lose for all parties involved. 

Instead of dismissing employee feedback, or viewing exit interviews as a tick-box exercise, create standard processes for analyzing the data and identifying potential trends. Pre-exit interview surveys and templates help develop consistency across all exit interviews. 

Since they help collect the same questions, surveys are a great way to harness the power of HR analytics. This can help identify the kinds of trends that can then be used to inform employee engagement and retention strategies. 

For example, if the majority of departing employees mention the lack of remote working options, developing policies to allow this can help boost retention. Or if several employees who left before the one-year mark mention they didn’t receive enough training, HR should look to develop better onboarding programs to make sure new hires have access to necessary training and resources. 

Before making any changes, HR team members need to create a process for sharing data with the leadership team, which is easy with a platform like Lattice. Share research-backed suggested actions and track any changes to retention over time, so everyone knows where things stand. 

Common Mistakes to Avoid With Exit Interviews

Exit interviews and surveys are a powerful way to collect constructive feedback that can help improve engagement, performance, and retention. But they can be tricky to get right. Here are some common mistakes — plus how to avoid them. 

Using Leading Questions

Leading questions can bias your feedback and ultimately devalue the exit interview process. The question “Are you leaving because of your manager?” might produce a different answer than the more neutral query “Why did you start looking for a new job?”

How to avoid it: Use a template to guide exit interview conversations, and include neutral questions that don’t encourage a specific type of response. Regular training can also help interviewers identify and avoid the use of leading questions. 

Not Taking Action

Collecting feedback is important, but acting on it is crucial. If HR doesn’t analyze the data from exit interviews and use them to create changes and improvements, employee retention may remain an issue. 

How to avoid it: Use standardized templates and lists of survey questions to ensure you’re able to collect consistent, actionable data. HR tech can then help highlight any areas for action and track trends over time. 

Not Maintaining Confidentiality

If employees are worried their feedback won’t be treated confidentially, they’re far less likely to tell you the honest reasons why they’re leaving. 

How to avoid it: Make sure employees know their responses will remain private, if feasible. If not, explain who will see their responses and how they’ll be used. 

Use exit interviews to help departing employees feel heard.

Exit interviews are an organization’s last opportunity to make a good impression. By giving them the same importance as other conversations across the employee lifecycle, you can show departing employees that their opinions matter, and their voices are heard. 

When combined with the best practice tips above, this approach makes it possible to uncover the kinds of insights needed to create meaningful change. Ready to unlock the power of effective exit interviews? Sign up for a demo and start integrating Lattice into your exit processes.