More than half of UK employees were not invited to a formal exit interview when resigning from their last job role, new research has shown.
The survey, by Ireland-based talent solutions specialist Cpl’s Talent Evolution Group, also discovered that an additional third of employees were not asked for feedback at all, an omission the research described as “a missed opportunity for valuable employee engagement”.
Failure to provide an opportunity to receive feedback from employees meant that organisations risked it being shared online instead. Public review platforms such as Glassdoor and Comparably had been used by 69% of the survey respondents to review a previous employer. Because half of these reviews contained negative sentiment, companies were risking reputational damage by skipping the process of an exit interview, and were missing the chance to resolve the concerns of their workforce internally.
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Most participants stated they would have felt comfortable enough to share these views and opinions with their employer, had they been asked.
Áine Fanning, managing director at Cpl’s Talent Evolution Group, said: “There’s a clear disconnect between why employers think their employees are leaving and the actual reason behind employee exits.”
She added that more than a quarter of former employees felt their feedback would not make a difference to the workplace and said companies needed to make “a concerted effort to better understand why employees are leaving and take meaningful action to retain them”. If they did so, “employers could gain an edge in the race to attract, develop, and retain the talent they need to create a thriving post pandemic organisation”.
With more than half of respondents revealing they would have considered a counter offer during the process of exiting their last role had they been approached, organisations should consider the exit process not only as a valuable chance to gain employee feedback, but also an opportunity to retain talent.
The survey was conducted among 1,500 ex-employees who have resigned from a job within the past five years.
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