The Benefits of the Exit Interview (free template)
The exit interview, done well, is a…
- Discovery tool
- Bad hire redeemer
- An informal evaluation of employees supervisor and your church systems
- Confirmation of the things you and your church are doing well
When an employee leaves your staff, your first reaction is not to ask them to complete another assignment and then schedule a sit down meeting. But, whether you “want” to do it or not, the exit interview form and meeting are valuable.
Whether the employee is leaving with grievances, or is simply leaving because their spouse is being moved out of state, an exit interview makes sense. The feedback collected in the exit interview will help you as a leader, your church, and it communicates to the employee their experiences with you and perspective matters.
Our church has a fairly comprehensive exit interview template. And for readers, I’ve provided it on my resource page, free for use in the “Onboarding/Offboarding section.”
The reason for the employee’s exit will determine how much of the exit interview template we use, and how we conduct the interview meeting.
We provide the exit interview questions to them in advance (we may remove some questions depending their unique situation). We ask them to respond to the questions in writing prior to our meeting. Then, together at the in-person meeting the employee overviews their responses for those in the meeting. The “who” in the exit interview meeting needs to be determined for each church. It may or may not include their direct supervisor, but it should at least include someone higher in the employee’s line of reporting, and it could include a volunteer leader, maybe someone from your church’s personnel team or an Elder.
One of many upsides for an exit interview is that it can bring learning from what’s an unfortunate departure. They’ll be times when you’ve made a bad hire (but I’ve written 13 previous posts about avoiding this by hiring right for your church staff). And at some point, bad hires leave. When that happens, the exit interview can be serve as a redemption tool.
The redemption tool: the exit interview.
Okay, “redemption” tool may be a little strong, but if done correctly, it does benefit you and your church enough to lessen the blow a bad hire. It can provide you insight for what went wrong in the selection process, onboarding process, or in ongoing supervision of an employee.
Listen to your exiting employees. Be willing to hear the good and the bad about you, your staff and church. Take advantage of this real-time, usually unrestrained feedback from an employee. The exit interview is a valuable tool.
p.s. As I mentioned earlier, if you’d like to view our Exit Interview template and perhaps borrow ideas, feel free. If you want more information about personnel practices from the creation of a job description, the initial interview phone call all the way to the exit interview, our church’s Selection Tool Kit is available for a minimal cost on our church’s resource site, Equippedchurch.es and includes over 25 PDF’s related to the selection process for churches.
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