How to Improve Exit Interview Participation Rates

From Beth N. Carvin

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Exit interviews are one of the best ways to get true and honest feedback from employees. The downside is that it takes time to build up a significant amount of data from exit interviews. Increasing your participation rate, however, can help you get greater amounts of actionable information faster from your exit interviews.

What is a Good Participation Rate for Exit Interviews?

Research shows that the average response rate for paper and pencil exit interviews is approximately 30-35 percent. This means that a company with 2000 employees and a 15 percent turnover rate would expect to receive about 100 completed exit interviews per year. At this participation level, the organization is getting exit feedback from just five percent of the total employee population.

With just a little extra effort, you should be able to double that response rate. Sixty-five percent or better is a good goal for exit interview participation. This can be accomplished with paper and pencil exit interviews, web based online exit interviews and telephone exit interviews.

Measuring Your Participation in the Exit Interview

To measure your response rate, divide the number of completed exit interviews by the number of employees from whom you requested an exit interview. Ideally the second number should equal the total number of terminations but for practical reasons this is generally not the case. As an example, if you have 125 completed exit interviews from 300 people whom you asked to complete an exit interview, your participation rate is 125 / 300 which equals .416 or 41.6 percent.

It is important to make sure you have a good method in place to track this kind of participation. At a minimum, you want to track participation rate at the start of an improvement project and then periodically thereafter. A more ideal scenario is to keep a running average that you can refer to regularly. This real-time number immediately alerts you to a fall off (or increase) in participation in exit interviews. An online exit interview management system should do this for you automatically.

Large companies might want to track participation rates separately for subsidiaries, large divisions or geographic regions. Small- to mid-size companies can generally benefit from a total participation rate for the organization.