An exit interview is a conversation with a departing employee. Its main goal is to understand the real reasons for leaving and get constructive feedback to improve things in the company.

Why you need it

  • Uncover the real reasons for leaving — pay, corporate culture, relationships with management, lack of growth and so on.
  • Get honest feedback. A departing employee is usually more candid than a current one — they no longer depend on the company.
  • Reduce employee turnover. Analysis lets you make concrete management decisions instead of acting at random.

Common mistakes

  • Ignoring the results. The biggest mistake: if a company collects feedback but does nothing with it, the interview loses its point and demotivates employees — it becomes busywork instead of producing real results.
  • No system. Irregular interviews and incomplete coverage of departing employees.
  • Box-ticking. A formal survey with no intention of really understanding what happened.

An exit interview is not a touching farewell but a chance to look inside the organization through the eyes of someone who decided to leave it. A well-designed process helps you make the right decisions — and make them in time.

How it works in TopHR

We implemented exit interviews as part of the employee lifecycle in TopHR. As soon as a termination order for an employee is created in 1C, TopHR picks up the event through the integration and automatically sends the employee a final task — to complete the interview. The employee answers a set of questions, and the record is added to their file — the system keeps accumulating statistics without manual work from HR.

An authorized user just clicks a button to see a dashboard with the accumulated analytics.

What the dashboard shows in practice

At one of our clients, the chart of reasons for leaving showed that lack of prospects, a change in job profile and unmet expectations together accounted for 39% of all departures — and all three are well within management's control.

The conclusion is straightforward: in many cases turnover can be reduced noticeably without a salary race — if you spot the pattern in time and address it through processes and management.

In TopHR, the exit interview launches automatically from 1C data and rolls up into a ready-made dashboard — no manual work from HR. We'll show you how to set it up in your company.