Archived Insight | November 5, 2019

Offboarding Employees is an Overlooked Edge for Your Organization

The realities of work in the 21st century have turned the average American employee into a nomad, wandering from organization to organization in search of better opportunities. Statistics from the Bureau of Labor show the median length of time an employee sticks with one organization to be just 4.6 years, a discouraging number for organizations forced to constantly recruit for the same positions.

But with the proper offboarding policy supported by streamlined HR operations, an offboarding employee can still add value to your organization by becoming one of your best recruiters for new talent. In addition to helping you find high-quality hires for your organization, the offboarding process gives you an opportunity to identify where you lag behind the competition through a frank discussion with offboarding employees.

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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.

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This page is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax or investment advice. You are encouraged to discuss the issues raised here with your legal, tax and other advisors before determining how the issues apply to your specific situations.