Let's be honest. Exit interviews don't work the way we want them to.
In a recent LinkedIn poll, 78% of responses said that exit interviews are either Very Ineffective or Ineffective. That's not great - and yet we still conduct exit interviews regularly.
Why?
Many will cite that exit interviews produce insights that decrease future attrition. Others note that an exit interview shows empathy and compassion to a departing employee. While this may be true, there is often little evidence of the impact made through the exit interview process. Unfortunately, the return on investment from standard exit interviews is likely very low, given the cost of the process and the challenges with the data actually collected.
As a rule of thumb, every 1,000 employee exits will require a full HR FTE to execute the exit interview process, inclusive of coordination, preparation, interview, and documentation steps. This rule of thumb also suggests that the cost per interview is about $100. To calculate your investment, multiple your number of exits by $100.
One recent client calculated their investment in exit interviews as $84,000. This was based on their actual exits, a detailed review of the process to conduct the interview, and their average cost of the resources conducting the interviews. This struck them as more than they expected, but accurately reflected the feedback of their HR Partner team, who was accountable for managing the process.
HR resources are a precious resource, particularly for mid-size companies or those in lower margin businesses where your team often operates sub-scale. As such, the exit interviewing process has a direct cost plus the indirect impact of pulling limited resources away from other priorities.
There are four key reasons that the data gathered from the exit interview process may not be reliable. These issues challenge the quality of any identified actionable insights.
Among the concerns we hear from employees about the exit interview:
If there are concerns about the quality of the discussion and how the feedback will be heard, it's less likely that the departing employee will provide thoughtful, accurate feedback.
HR people are people too. We come to every interaction with a degree of bias, which distorts the signals we hear and the matters we choose to probe into.
The bias can come from relationships. For example, if the interviewer has had previous challenges with the employee's manager, any comment about the manager is likely to gather added attention. Similarly, if the departing employee has been a high performer, their feedback might be amplified more than a core performer even though their exit feedback should be considered more evenly.
The bias can also come from the interviewer's own beliefs. For example, if the interviewer believes pay might be an issue, or they feel paid out of market themselves, any comment about compensation is likely to garner more attention.
It's very difficult to remove bias from an interviewing process, and in the exit interview context it's also hard to control for that bias when analyzing the results. As such, we don't even know how biased the data is.
While exit interviews often follow a guide, the data is typically captured as notes - free text, on a notepad (physical or virtual) that is personal to the interviewer. Very rarely is the data collected and centralized for analysis. As a result, a review of the "findings" of the exit interview process are typically the judgement of the interviewer. This tends to be subject to recency bias, and underlying trends can easily be missed.
An employee's reasons for leaving a role are often very personal and complex. It's rarely one thing, and even when it is it is often a different thing than other employees. To really understand why that employee is leaving and what kept them as long as they stayed, it's important to diagnose the breadth of the value proposition, like the Novo Insights Join/Stay/Perform model at right (click for larger image).
Unfortunately, asking about all of these facets of the role can come across as burdensome in an interview, creating a longer discusion and some repstitiveness to the questioning. Employees - and HR professionals - don't want to read a questionnaire and ask the same question repeatedly to be exhaustive in the discussion.
Certain themes tend to recur: manager, compensation, career alignment... the usual suspects. That said, traditional interviews make it difficult to understand if the rate of that feedback in your organization is normal. It's quite possible that the themese identified are quite usual, which can lead to investment in solutions unlikely to make a real impact.
In short: Exit interviews are a lot of work and a meaningful expense - with uncertain real impact.
Of course, exit interviews can play a role in mitigating employee relations risk, and certainly insights can be obtained by a skilled interviewer. But that value often doesn't scale, and most organizations find the exit interview process is ineffective even at meeting those specific objectives.
Supplementing - or replacing - your exit interview program with an exit survey can improve ROI by having a lower cost, higher impact approach to listening to departing employees. With a survey, you can reduce time spent by both the employee and HR while gathering structured, high quality data about the employee's exit process.
An exit survey overcomes the key challenges identified above:
Even when an organization still desires exit interviews, deploying an exit survey can be used to reduce the number of interviews or the length of the interview required. Organizations can ask employees to opt-in to an exit interview, which reduces waste associated with employees not engaged in a quality exit. Alternatively, organizations can choose to allow responses to be shared with the interviewer, which can create a more efficient interviewer (at the cost of confidentiality).
Novo Retain is a simple-to-deploy exit survey that helps your team gather structured data from departing employees, without the challenges of exit interviews. Gather better insights with our FREE version, or customize the experience for even greater impact.