If exit interview software doesn’t have certain essential features, employees won’t use it. This leaves employers in the dark about employee retention.

Anonymous Feedback

Your employees want to give you feedback. There are two questions you need to ask:

Are you providing the right forum for feedback?

Are you asking the right questions?

In addition, there are two best practices you should adopt. First, your exit interview software needs to be anonymous, and the employee needs to know the survey is anonymous. You’re less likely to get honest answers if you hand them a sheet of paper or email them a Word document they need to send back with answers.

Second, make sure the exit interview survey isn’t the first time you’ve asked for feedback. If they use your employee survey system for onboarding and periodic updates, they’ll be more likely to fill out the exit interview survey.

Download the Infographic – How to Build an Effective Offboarding Strategy

Customized Questions

We’ve all filled out surveys asking us to ‘rate our satisfaction’. If you’re referring an employee to the exit interview software, satisfaction isn’t a productive way to frame the conversation. If they were completely satisfied they wouldn’t have resigned.

Get specific feedback on why they’re leaving your organization. Ask about their supervisors, their team and how they succeeded or fell short in their experience.

Exiting employees are in a position to provide actionable information about their team. Avoid questions like, ‘Why are you leaving?’ you’ll get answers like, ‘I got another job’.

Automation & Reporting

Gathering useful feedback from former employees only helps if you can find patterns in the data. Manually plugging results into a spreadsheet or reviewing all the submissions in a meeting may not lead quickly identifying those trends.

Using automated employee engagement software will allow you to design your survey, provide it to employees at the right time and review the patterns as they emerge.

Hearing, ‘I left for a new job’ doesn’t provide any new information. Instead, learning why employees really resign is the first step to improving your hiring, retention and recruitment efforts. After all, if former employees keep telling you, ‘I left for higher pay’ or ‘there were no opportunities for internal growth’, those are trends you can take to your organization for improvement.