In the first two parts of our Employee Journey series, we already looked at the Candidate Experience and the Employee Experience. The last part of the Employee Journey now describes the offboarding, the phase in which an employee leaves the employer. For managers, this process is often not very important because the leaving employee is no longer part of their goal achievement. However, offboarding is just as important throughout the entire Employee Journey as the recruiting process or onboarding!

► It is crucial that the employee leaves the company with a positive feeling and recommends his former employer.

A bad or missing offboarding process also leads to negative ratings on Glassdoor. If bad ratings accumulate, this in turn has a bad effect on recruiting – with a total rating of 3.5, there is a need for action!

Employers must therefore consider how they can get a good rating from the leaving employee. In addition, an employee who feels valued after termination is more willing to hand over his or her area of responsibility to colleagues in detail.

In this context, it is important to have a detailed exit interview in which the employee has the opportunity to leave frustration behind – then he no longer has to do so at Glassdoor. And the employer gains valuable information that can be used to prevent further fluctuation. Of particular interest here are questions relating to leadership, working conditions, corporate culture or personnel development.

Part of the exit interview should be as well:

• A heartfelt thank-you to the employee.
• An invitation to stay in touch via social media – also regarding a possible renewed cooperation.
• An invitation to alumni meetings to keep the positive relationship going.

► Moreover, the exit of an employee should also be communicated as quickly as possible to the employees in order to prevent rumours from arising.

A job reference should be written as quickly as possible and not months later. For managers, creating a certificate is usually an annoying affair. So, this process is often postponed. However, this process can be largely automated with suitable software, a so-called reference letter generator.

The manager receives a message via the HR collaboration platform that an offboarding is pending. They can then rate the employee using smileys, for example – comfortably from their smartphone. The software then generates the certificate from predefined, legally compliant text modules. The job description is automatically imported from the HCM system. The document can be created in just a few minutes. The manager signs digitally and the document is sent to the employee within a very short time. The employee can immediately use the reference letter for his future applications.

A professionally designed offboarding process therefore helps to improve the employer image – because employees leave the company with a positive feeling. With software assistance, processes such as certificate creation can be automated.