Your checklist for a successful offboarding process

Before offboarding employees shuffle out of the office for the last time, you need to make sure you’ve wrapped up the following tasks in order to consider the offboarding process a successful one.

Find out why the employee is leaving

Exit interviews can either come from HR or from the employee’s manager, but you need to understand why your organization is no longer a good fit. Is a middle manager causing personality clashes? Does your benefits package pale in comparison to the competition?

Try to get as specific as possible so you can see if any patterns emerge from the data collected from all offboarding employees.

Make sure the employee has transferred valuable knowledge

If you rely on the offboarding employee to make processes vital to your organization run successfully, make sure that expertise doesn’t leave with the employee.

While you could require the employee to write a how-to manual for his or her successor, a better way to ensure efficient knowledge transfer is to pair the departing employee with a coworker, who learns whatever needs to be learned in order to keep this information with the organization.

Focus on making the employee feel valued

To prospective hires, a former worker possesses a tremendous amount of authority and authenticity regarding your organization—and whether it would be a good fit.

Try and make sure your offboarding employee leaves with a good impression by publicly acknowledging that their hard work will be missed and wish them luck with their future endeavors.

Streamlining the offboarding process

Our data shows 47% of quality hires come to organizations through referrals. If just 5% of new hires during the next 5 years come to an organization through referrals, it reduces recruiting costs by $2.5 million. With those kind of numbers in play, you’ll want to tap all of the expertise available in streamlining HR systems to make your offboarding process as efficient as possible. Our team can work with you to put in place HR operations that automate the drudgery and busywork so you can focus on turning exiting employees into your strongest recruiting assets.