Entry Interviews, Stay Interviews, Exit Interviews: What’s the Difference and Which is Best?

About The Event

A recent Harvard Business Review article ‘How to Keep Your Top Talent’ warns that 25% of your top talent plans to jump ship in the next year.  It also found one in three admit to not putting all their effort into their jobs. This should be alarming to companies who believe that their competitiveness relies on the passion, drive and creative energy of their talented people.

Here are three ways a company can learn about the retention and turnovers factors that influence their employee’s decisions to be fully engaged or not and whether they will be committed to your company or start looking for greener pastures.

Many companies use exit interviews to find out why employees are leaving their jobs. Unfortunately, asking an employee on their last day “why are you leaving?” doesn’t provide useful information in time to prevent the turnover. They are somewhat helpful but here are two more effective ways to retain your top talent.

An entry interview with each new hire during onboarding to learn about their expectations, their goals, and how to engage them as well as the 5 key questions new employee have that need to be answered quickly to avoid disengagement.

A stay interview helps managers understand why employees stay so that those important factors can be reinforced. They also signal frustrations that can be nipped in the bud before they drive the employee to start looking elsewhere.

Adding both entry stay interviews to your engagement and strategies can help your organization retain critical employees.  It’s the single best tool you can give managers.

Areas Covered

The best way to find out what your employees want and how to retain them is to ask them. Ask questions to gauge how you’re meeting your employees’ expectations. Not just “How’s it going?”, but specific questions to get specific answers.

Explore why your talent remain with your company. Why did they join the organization? How well are their objectives or dreams being fulfilled? Which aspects of their work do they enjoy the most? Which do they least enjoy? Are they receiving sufficient opportunities for growth and development? What would influence them to look elsewhere?

Learn the difference between the entry interview during onboarding, the exit interview when they have already decided to leave and the stay interview which gives you the best information about the retention drivers – their expectations, engagement, and experience motivators.

Both entry and stay interviews provides the manager the opportunity to build trust with employees and a chance to assess the degree of employee satisfaction and engagement that exists in their department, team or company. Additional benefits are that they:

• Provide a two-way conversation and a chance to ask questions,
• Get more in-depth understanding of that employee’s current motivation
• Identify actions that can improve the employee experience and actions that can help eliminate any major turnover triggers.

Learning Objectives

These seven points will be covered.

• Identify five key factors that impact an employee’s desire to stay or leave
• Recognize four possible “triggers” that cause the employee to consider leaving
• Learn how to ask probing questions and conduct effective, efficient exit & stay interviews
• Survey a list of eight retention actions to increase employee’s loyalty and commitment
• Review a sample of entry & stay interview questions and develop your own customized list to ask
• Discover how to develop a retention plan for your employees and manage accountability
• Learn why managers are the key and how they contribute to the success of your talent retention programs 

Who will Benefit

CEO’s, COO’s, VP of Human Resources, Chief Learning Officer, Directors, Project Managers, Operation Managers and Supervisors, Team Leaders, Human Resources Professionals. Managers and Supervisors, talent management professionals

Bonus Handouts: Do’s and Don’ts for Stay and Entry Interviews