Exit interview meeting

An exit interview is a bittersweet moment. You might feel unhappy that an employee is leaving, but you might also feel excited about their new journey. Either way, an exit interview is a beneficial process for both sides, especially when it's done right. But what should an exit interview include? We’ve got you covered, with all the important information to help you run your exit interview meeting with confidence.

What happens at an exit interview?

Exit interviews involve a meeting with the departing employee's manager. Depending on the structure of the organization, an exit interview is conducted by the HR Manager. The reason for this is because often, employees are more comfortable sharing honest feedback about their experience with HR rather than their direct manager.

The primary purpose of an exit interview meeting is to understand the reason why the employee decided to resign. This data is helpful to better understand the company culture, uncover any issues, and eventually improve the attrition rate. Improving the attrition rate directly affects the company's revenue because simply put, it is more expensive to replace and hire a new employee.

Recommended Time: An hour is enough to cover all the exit interivew meeting questions. However, you can extend the meeting up to 90 minutes if you feel that a lengthier discussion is needed.

How do I invite someone to an exit interview meeting?

Whether it's an in-person or virtual meeting, it's best to send an exit interview meeting invitation at least one day before with a link to the agenda. You can also include a form that the employee can fill out beforehand. But, how do you exactly fill out an exit interview form?

There are two options:

• First, you can ask the employee to answer the questions asynchronously before the meeting, so during the call, you just need to discuss the answers.
• The second option is to skip the form entirely and record the answers in a Zoom call. After the call, you can write a short summary with an offboarding checklist.

If you're wondering how to summarize exit interview results, there are many ways you can do this. You may have a central document containing each questions and the responses from all employees who have conducted an exit interview. Alternatively, you can have one single document per employee where you add a single bullet point or sentence of their responses with a link to their full response. These are only a few of the ways to summarize the results.

What's Inside This Exit Interview Meeting Template

So, what is discussed in an exit interview? You'll need to cover the basics, such as the name, position, and last day of work. But the heart of the meeting is to discuss why the person decided to leave. We've created this template, so you can make sure you cover every essential section and exit interview question during the meeting.

Details of the individual exiting

Identify the name, job title, department, start date within the organization & start date of the position, last day of work, and any other positions held.

Ask Questions

These are a few of the exit interview questions included in this template.

• Describe the primary reason(s) you are leaving your current position.
• Provide an evaluation of your supervisor
• What advice would you give to the new employee who will be coming into your position?

There are more questions to help uncover any issues when you start using this exit interview template.

Processing Employee Feedback

Record employee responses and use the information gathered to better understand the positive and negative aspects of your organization.

Action Items

A list of items that need to be handled before the employee officially leaves the organization and immediately after. You can directly include the task list using this template, complete with an owner and a completion date. This can also serve as the offboarding checklist. Use this template to see the sample checklist.

Use this Free Exit Interview Meeting Template

Exit interview meetings can be tricky, especially if the employee left due to a negative experience, but with the right process, it can be extremely valuable for both sides. Check out other templates for the HR team, such as the Performance Review. 👇