When someone walks out your office door for the last time, they’re taking valuable insights with them. The question is: will you capture those insights before they’re gone forever? An exit interview represents one of the most underutilized opportunities in business. Done right, it can reveal blind spots in your management, uncover systemic issues, and help you retain future talent.
This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about exit interviews, from understanding their true purpose to crafting questions that encourage honest, actionable feedback.
What Is an Exit Interview?
An exit interview is a structured conversation between an employer and an employee who’s leaving the organization. It typically happens during the employee’s final days or weeks on the job.
Exit interviews can take several forms:
Face-to-face meetings with HR or a manager
Phone calls conducted by an external party
Online surveys or questionnaires
A combination of written and verbal formats
The format matters less than the approach. What counts is creating an environment where departing employees feel comfortable sharing honest feedback.
Why Exit Interviews Matter More Than You Think
Up to 39% of companies skip exit interviews, but doing so can leave valuable information on the table.
The companies that do perform them often treat exit interviews like a formality. They ask a few generic questions, nod politely, and file the responses away. That’s a missed opportunity.
Here’s why exit interviews deserve your attention:
They reveal hidden problems: Current employees often hesitate to speak up about workplace issues. They worry about retaliation, career impact, or being labeled as complainers. Departing employees have less to lose and more to gain by being honest.
They provide competitive intelligence: When employees leave for competitors, they can offer insights into what other companies are doing better. Maybe they’re offering better benefits, more flexible work arrangements, or clearer advancement paths. This information helps you stay competitive in the talent market. You can’t match every offer, but you can identify patterns and address systemic disadvantages.
They validate or challenge assumptions: Leadership teams often operate with assumptions about what employees value most. Exit interviews test these assumptions against reality. You might assume people leave for more money, only to discover they’re actually leaving because of poor work-life balance or lack of recognition. These insights can reshape your retention strategy.
They demonstrate that you care: Even when an employee is leaving, how you handle their departure affects your reputation. A thoughtful exit interview shows you value feedback and are committed to improvement.
The key to effective exit interviews is asking the right questions in the right way. Here are the questions that tend to generate the most valuable insights:
Understanding the Departure Decision
What initially prompted you to start looking for other opportunities?
Was there a specific moment or event that solidified your decision to leave?
What could we have done differently to retain you?
Evaluating the Work Environment
How would you describe the culture of your team/department?
Did you feel your contributions were recognized and valued?
How would you rate the communication within your team and with leadership?
Assessing Management and Leadership
What did your manager do well, and what could they have done better?
Did you feel comfortable approaching your manager with concerns or ideas?
How would you describe the decision-making process in your role/team?
What skills did you want to develop that you couldn’t develop here?
How did you envision your career progressing if you had stayed?
Understanding Job Satisfaction
What aspects of your job did you enjoy most?
What parts of your role were most frustrating or challenging?
How manageable was your workload?
Gathering Improvement Suggestions
What would you change about this organization if you could?
Would you recommend this company as a place to work? Why or why not?
If you were in charge of improving employee retention, what would be your top three priorities?
How to Conduct Exit Interviews Effectively
Having good questions is only part of the equation. How you conduct the interview matters just as much. These considerations can help ensure that you’re making the most of the opportunity.
Time it Properly
Schedule the exit interview during the employee’s final week, but not on their last day. They should have enough distance to be reflective, but not so much that they’re checked out.
Provide advance notice about the interview and share some of the questions beforehand to allow them to think about their responses.
Choose the Right Interviewer
The interviewer shouldn’t be the departing employee’s direct manager, as this creates too much potential for conflict or discomfort. Options include:
HR representatives
Senior leaders from other departments
External consultants or services
The key is choosing someone who can remain neutral and professional.
Create a Safe Environment
Start by explaining the purpose of the interview and how the feedback will be used. Assure them that their responses will be kept confidential and won’t affect their reference or final employment records.
Be genuinely curious, not defensive. When they share criticism, respond with questions like “Can you give me an example?” or “What would improvement look like?” rather than explanations or justifications.
Document and Follow Up
Take detailed notes during the interview. Some companies also provide a summary to the departing employee to ensure accuracy.
Most importantly, act on the feedback. If multiple people mention the same issue, it’s probably worth addressing. Share anonymous insights with relevant managers and track what changes you make as a result.
Making it about you: Don’t use the exit interview to defend your company or convince the person to stay. That ship has sailed. Your job is to listen and learn.
Asking leading questions: Examples like “You didn’t leave because of your manager, did you?” suggest the answer you want to hear. Stick to neutral, open-ended questions.
Focusing only on negatives: While it’s important to understand problems, don’t forget to ask what’s working well. This helps you preserve positive aspects of the employee experience.
Failing to follow up: If you don’t act on feedback, employees will notice. Word spreads quickly when exit interviews are just for show.
Waiting too long: Don’t wait until someone’s mentally checked out to have this conversation. By then, they may not be willing to invest the time and energy needed for meaningful feedback.
Turning Feedback Into Action
The best exit interview in the world isn’t worth much if you don’t act on the insights. Here’s how to turn feedback into meaningful change.
Look for Patterns
One person’s complaint might be an isolated issue. Three people mentioning the same problem suggests a systemic issue worth addressing.
Prioritize Based on Impact
Not all feedback is equally important. Focus on issues that affect retention, productivity, or employee satisfaction broadly.
Communicate Changes
When you make changes based on exit interview feedback, let your team know. This shows that you take feedback seriously and are committed to improvement.
Track Results
Monitor key metrics like turnover rates, employee satisfaction scores, and retention by department. This helps you understand if your changes are working.
Making Exit Interviews Part of Your Culture
Exit interviews shouldn’t be an afterthought. They should be part of a broader commitment to continuous improvement and employee feedback. Also, sharing insights from exit interviews (without identifying individuals) with your management team helps managers understand common issues and improve their approach.
Remember, the goal isn’t to prevent all turnover. Some departures are inevitable and even healthy. The goal is to understand why people leave and make improvements that benefit everyone who stays. Your next departing employee is sitting on information that could transform your workplace. The question is: are you ready to listen?
Building an effective hiring process from scratch involves identifying your company’s needs and setting a path to find quality applicants. By examining past hiring practices and implementing new strategies, you can build a more efficient process. Read on for some ways to create a hiring process that gets results.
Primary Elements of the Hiring Process
There are three main aspects of the hiring process, with several steps under each umbrella. Take a closer look at the big picture:
Step 1: Recruiting
Reach out to existing networks
Gather referrals from existing employees
Consider internal promotions
Develop a talent pipeline
Post on job boards
Step 2: Hiring
Receive applications
Screen applicants
Conduct interviews
Extend offers
Step 3: Onboarding
Gather required documents
Introduce benefits
Establish job responsibilities
Connect with trainers and mentors
Follow up at established intervals
Each of these three categories is important for meeting key hiring goals and creating a positive experience for both the hiring team and prospective employees.
They also help with:
Generating a pool of qualified candidates
Keeping organized and meeting process deadlines
Maximizing time-to-hire
Effectively communicating with prospective employees throughout the process
Creating a welcoming atmosphere during hiring
Encouraging retention through a robust onboarding program
Using ApplicantStack to Build Your Hiring Process
Communication and visibility are core values that can guide how you structure your hiring process. All the stakeholders on the hiring team should have all relevant information at their fingertips. Relying on traditional communication methods for hiring tasks can obscure important information. Using an application tracking system like ApplicantStack provides a visual record of each phase of the process.
Creating a New Job
Once you identify a job that needs to be filled, you can enter it into ApplicantStack and populate it with associated tasks:
Approval from HR or managers
Identify important details like location, department, start date, salary
Write a job description
Post on job boards
ApplicantStack has an integrated posting module for each job board and social media site. You can quickly post open positions, see their status, and can even enable a text-to-apply feature for jobs where you need quick turnaround.
Receiving Applications
Candidates for every open job are entered into ApplicantStack for viewing and sorted in the order most relevant to your needs. You can sort by job, hiring stage, and importance, as well as by rating (once you’ve done some initial screening). This effort can help the hiring team keep track of the order of importance for scheduling interviews.
Candidates can indicate their preferred means of communication, enabling quicker response times.
Hiring Team Division of Labor
The email tab sends invitations for each individual’s assigned tasks, with options to set reminders and create calendar items. The email contains all the relevant data about the candidate, position, and stage of the process, so there’s never any confusion about where anyone stands.
Once you accept an assignment, you can create a task list that’s sortable by date and status and includes integrated contact links to complete tasks within the software. This instantly updates the candidate’s profile so anyone else checking in can see where they stand.
Offers and Onboarding
ApplicantStack creates customizable templates for offer letters. You can make offers from within the software and, once accepted, transition the candidate to employee to take advantage of the powerful onboarding tools. With mobile and desktop access, new hires can upload tax forms, access and download company manuals and benefits information, and e-sign required documents for their personnel file.
You can also create checklists for new hires to keep track of training and give them a sense of accomplishment in their new role. Checklists are a good reminder for managers and HR to periodically check in with new hires, help resolve concerns, and meet company retention goals.
Reports and Analysis
When setting up a hiring process from scratch, you’re likely to hit a few bumps in the road as you refine the procedures to best fit your company. ApplicantStack’s integrated reports can help you understand key metrics such as time-to-hire and identify bottlenecks in the process. Each hire can teach you something about how to improve your process and where you had the most success.
The need for high-volume, non-exempt roles in the retail, food service, and healthcare support sectors often outpaces companies’ abilities to hire quickly. In these busy industries, shifts can run 24 hours, and turnover is frequent, creating a challenge for hiring managers. If degree or experience requirements are creating a barrier to finding quality candidates, consider a new, skills-based approach.
What Is Skills-Based Hiring?
Skills-based hiring is a hiring approach that prioritizes a candidate’s applicable job skills over more traditional metrics like degrees, job titles, or experience. To implement this method most effectively, your company would develop a list of the most desirable skills for available jobs and evaluate each candidate by screening for those attributes. According to the Academy to Innovate HR, you should consider the following:
Specific skill requirements (what someone must be able to do)
Skill proficiency levels (how well they must do it)
Measurable outputs or outcomes (what success looks like in practice).
The workforce is populated by quality workers who opted out of a traditional four-year college track for a variety of reasons. With effective screening questions, you can find those whose skills are a great match for your company.
Valuable Skills for Hourly and Frontline Workers
Resumes often list vague skills like “good communicator” or “team player.” For effective hiring, you need to discover what specific skills your company requires.
Retail workers, for example, need to have proficiency with point-of-sale software, understand how to follow a store-specific planogram to reset the sales floor, and demonstrate excellent customer service.
Hospital support staff need to demonstrate the ability to follow required health and safety protocols, multitask, and – if directly involved in patient care – compassion and empathy.
Food service workers need to understand and navigate the intricacies of timing in a busy restaurant, demonstrate proficiency in mandatory food safety protocols, and provide care and service to multiple customers at a time.
Other skills you may consider valuable for hourly and frontline jobs:
Most of these skills aren’t readily recognizable from a college degree or a job title on a resume. That’s where skills-based screening questions can help you select candidates who can do the job with skills and attributes they have already developed.
20 Skills-Based Screening Question Examples
“You come to work expecting your typical workload. When you arrive, you discover you need to cover for another co-worker too. How do you adapt your routine?”
“How would you handle this situation? You’re given a job and partway through completion, you’re asked by a supervisor to do it a different way.”
“Have you ever given instructions to someone and discovered they did the job incorrectly? How did you handle that? What did that teach you about yourself?”
“Describe a conflict at work. What was your process to deal with it?”
“What do you do differently than other people you’ve worked with in your occupation?”
“Describe the health and safety rules of this job.”
“Have you ever had an accident or a close call related to safety requirements?”
“Have you ever discovered you made a mistake? How did you handle it?”
“How do you motivate others in your stewardship?”
“How do you approach working with colleagues who approach tasks differently from you?”
“Describe the conditions that help you do your best work.”
“What skills do you enjoy using the most?”
“Tell me about a time you implemented a change to a process or procedure at work.”
“What kind of problems do you enjoy solving? How do you approach the process?”
“How do you cope with stressful situations at work?”
“How do you handle working on multiple tasks at once?”
“At what point do you involve managers or supervisors when making a decision?”
“Describe a situation you would have handled differently now that you’ve had some time to think about it.”
“How do you handle angry customers / patients / clients?”
“What does good customer service look like to you?”
Screening for quality candidates in high-volume industries is most effective with a skills-based approach. Finding the workers who can handle the daily tasks specific to your business will lead to productivity, retention, and excellent client care. Using ApplicantStack allows you to screen for specific skills before interviews happen. Explore this applicant-tracking system and how it can simplify hiring for frontline roles.
One of the most important metrics in your hiring process is time-to-hire. Discovering where your company experiences delays and bottlenecks can help you apply best practices to shorten the metric overall. Consider some of the ways to attack this problem head-on.
What Is Time-to-Hire?
Time-to-hire refers to the number of days between a candidate’s application for an open position and the official acceptance of an offer. The first day can also start when a recruiter introduces a candidate to your company. Though the metric is simple to calculate, it can reveal some more complex inefficiencies in your company’s hiring process.
Average Time-to-Hire
According to some recent statistics, time-to-hire is increasing across many industries compared to previous years. Large companies hover around 46 to 51 days, but small and medium businesses are almost double that at 83 days. Some of that difference can be explained by larger, more focused hiring teams, but it may also reveal patterns that can be resolved without a huge budget investment.
Each day that’s added to the time-to-hire metric costs your company money; SHRM suggests the minimum average cost to hire is $5,700, with executive hiring coming in at almost seven times that, at $36,000. Your company’s hiring costs could fall anywhere within that wide range, underscoring the importance of a streamlined timeline.
Calculating Time-to-Hire
As you consider your company’s most recent hires, you can calculate your average using the following formula:
The chosen candidate, Sarah, accepted your offer on day 41. She submitted her resume 16 days after you posted the position.
41 – 16 = 25 days for Sarah’s time-to-hire
Calculate the data from other recent hires:
Hank = 29 days
Teri = 38 days
Holly = 41 days
Abby = 19 days
25 + 29 + 38 + 41 + 19 = 152 days / divided by 5 hires = 30.4 days average
The data shows it takes about a month for your company to fill a position. Metrics are a useful way to make positive changes in processes; if you asked four different people in the company to guess how long it takes, you’d likely get four different answers.
A month-long open position likely entails potential monetary and opportunity costs:
Productivity goes down
Projects remain unfinished
Unhappy clients take their business elsewhere
Current employees take on extra work to fill the gaps, leading to costly overtime or worker burnout
Teams are overstressed, and morale suffers
Identifying Hiring Delays
A typical hiring process looks something like this:
Step 1: Identify job needs
Step 2: Write job description
Step 3: Advertise the job
Step 4: Receive applications
Step 5: Screen applications
Step 6: Interview candidates
Step 7: Identify the chosen candidate
Step 8: Extend offer
At each of those eight steps, there is the possibility of delay.
Automating hiring
Automation tools can help you chip away at compounding delays before they become long bottlenecks. ApplicantStack Recruit provides a central place to store previous job descriptions, ready for editing and updating. With its customizable dashboard, you can organize your open positions using relevant data, such as creation and modification dates, department, salary range, and more. It provides at-a-glance status updates to your hiring team without time-consuming meetings.
Customizing notifications
A customizable notification system can prompt managers to approve the creation of new jobs in the dashboard, then notify the hiring team to proceed with the next steps.
Each candidate can designate their preferred method of contact (email or text message) to allow for quick and easy interview scheduling requests. The status of each interviewee is available to your entire team, eliminating communication delays that can cause you to lose out on top talent.
Reviewing data
The Pipeline Summary shows the number of applicants and their place in the process, customizable to your company’s hiring practices. When you see 25 new applicants and zeros across the rest of the steps, you’ll know that screening and interview scheduling need immediate attention.
Utilizing screening tools
Screening tools allow you to filter candidates using customizable keywords or search terms, and then apply filters such as scores, ratings, and stages. You can assign access to each member of the hiring team so they can make unilateral decisions or flag specific candidates for broader review.
With a data-driven, automated system, your team can feel confident in the steps taken to arrive at the best candidate for a role and extend the offer within the workflow. A structured and organized approach prevents overlooked steps and keeps the process efficient and on time.
Implement ApplicantStack to Speed Up Time-to-Hire
An investment in an ATS can reveal where your process was bogged down by cumbersome email threads, delays in response, and even the overlooking of quality candidates due to a disorganized approach. ApplicantStack is your partner in reducing time-to-hire while helping you source the best people for your open positions.
Onboarding a new employee benefits both them and the company. Implementing a robust onboarding procedure not only makes new hires feel welcome, but it creates an important bond of trust that affects retention rates. Consider evaluating ways to improve your company’s onboarding process.
What Is Onboarding?
Onboarding is the step that follows job acceptance: it’s a process that introduces a new hire to the people, procedures, and responsibilities of the company and their position. Effective onboarding is structured, provides clear instructions and guidance, and connects the employee with someone they feel comfortable asking questions.
Why Is Onboarding Important?
The hiring process is an investment in the future of your company. It takes valuable employee time and budget to find the right fit for open positions. The energy you devote to hiring should carry over into onboarding, ensuring your new hires’ first impressions are positive. Surveys of new hires reveal some startling statistics about their first days at a new job:
86 percent make decisions about their future in the first six months of a new job.
Onboarding helps employees build relationships and find job satisfaction sooner.
80 percent said a good onboarding process would make them stay at a new job.
93 percent said some onboarding before day one made the process go smoothly.
Rather than waiting for the first day of work, have new hires fill out forms and provide company information beforehand. This can help lessen the feeling of an information dump on day one.
84 percent found communication before and after day one beneficial.
In addition to preboarding, follow up after the first day to address any concerns right away.
On average, employees said it took six to seven months to feel comfortable in a new job.
Onboarding can ease the transition, ensuring new employees want to stay well beyond their onboarding period. They are more likely to feel happy at work, which leads to greater productivity and collaboration.
In addition to supporting important job satisfaction and retention goals, effective, well-organized onboarding ensures legal compliance by collecting the documentation required to meet federal and local labor laws.
Before day one, you could set up new employees with access to the company portal. This is where ApplicantStack can ease the workflow. Candidates are easily transitioned to hires, who are assigned a series of tasks to complete. You can collect tax documents, give access to benefits information, and set up contracts for e-signatures. ApplicantStack can send reminders to ensure all tasks are completed on time. This early access gives employees a chance to review the paperwork at their convenience, under reduced pressure.
Day one welcome
For an in-person employee, the first day of work should include logistics such as showing them their workspace, providing the necessary computer or phone, and giving them a tour of the office. Some businesses provide company swag to help new hires feel welcome and part of the culture. You can ship tech and swag to remote employees if they’re not close enough to come into the office to pick it up.
Other materials might include a welcome packet with information on dress code, expected work schedule, timekeeping, and other aspects of company culture to help a new hire feel comfortable right away. Provide any entry codes or badges with a thorough explanation of security procedures.
Orientation and shadowing
To drill down into job responsibilities and tasks, set up a meeting with supervisors, other team members, and an assigned buddy to help them through the first few days of work. Shadowing can be an effective way to show collaborative tasks, require use of equipment, or involve interaction with customers or clients. It can show the nuances of how your company works, even if the person has held similar jobs before. Ensure that the person assigned to be the point of contact is open and available to answer questions, so the new hire doesn’t hesitate.
Demonstrate patience with new people. “Overall goals for the first week should include role definition, goal setting, explaining performance indicators and beginning assimilation into your company culture,” says Forbes’ Liz Masoner. Expect technology and policy glitches and reassure the new hire that it’s all part of the introductory process.
Ongoing support
Referring back to that “comfort at six to seven months” statistic, recognize that new hires need more than just a week-long introduction. New things will crop up that they didn’t know to ask about, and they need to feel that others are available and open to helping, even months into their employment. Consider offering weekly check-ins, open-door policies, mental health support, or find ways to recognize and acknowledge the work they have been contributing in their short time at the company.
Developing an organized, thoughtful, and welcoming onboarding program can help you avoid churn as you hire new employees. The more new hires feel educated and guided as they start their new roles within your company, the more they will feel like a valued part of your business and contribute the skills and talents that helped them stand out in the hiring process.
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