5 reasons to focus more on offboarding your employees the right way

1. Manage your employer brand

Offboarding marks the end of the employee's journey, so this is a moment that many departing employees remember. A negative offboarding experience leaves former employees with a bad feeling. Which means that they will be unlikely to recommend your organisation to friends and family, acquaintances or their network. With so many online platforms nowadays, it is easy to post a negative message and difficult, if not impossible, to change.  

According to the employer branding statistics, 84% of employees read online reviews about organisations before or while they are applying for jobs. So, positive reviews are important for organisations. Obviously, you want to avoid candidates only reading reviews from irate employees and then decide to drop out of the process. 

Perhaps writing a review is included in your onboarding programme. If not, in the offboarding process you might ask departing employees to write a review about your company. Applicants reading your company reviews will then have a better impression of your organisation.

Negative publicity can complicate your recruitment efforts and make it harder to retain your workforce. Companies with a positive employer's brand, however, receive up to 2x as many applications. One of the goals of your offboarding programme is to ensure that departing employees continue to feel positive about your brand, even when you part company.

2. Increase the likelihood of returning employees

Besides maximising your recruitment and retention efforts, good offboarding can smooth the way for employees to return later. Although opinions about returning employees vary, many industries benefit from welcoming back employees who already know the organisation.

These employees, also known as boomerang employees, are quickly trained and fully productive. This can save an organisation time and money and they will profit sooner from a returning employee.

A personal and positive offboarding experience enables a discussion of a possible return and ensures your organisation can benefit from an offboarding programme.

3. Increase the inflow of referral applicants

Another area where your departing employees can help is referral recruitment. As a brand ambassador, they can recommend your organisation to their network of friends and family. It is important to end the relationship with employees well as this will make it more likely that they will recommend your company.

Generally speaking, candidates who arrive via referrals are a better fit than candidates from other channels. It is also a cost-efficient way to fill your pipeline with candidates. You can set up your referral programme as informally or formally as your organisation needs. Whether you implement a reward or other system for referrals, your organisation will certainly benefit from a referral recruitment programme. 

The current cost of filling a vacancy is nearly € 4,500. Saving 10% of this amount by better offboarding for a company needing to fill 25 vacancies a year can easily amount to € 11,250 a year! With reasons and tips from this blog, you can certainly save that 10%.

4. Embedding knowledge

Completing and transferring work is perhaps the most important part of offboarding. Training your successor or drawing up a good transfer document can work. In other cases, a departing employee leaves with a lot of knowledge about the job. This may prevent your department or organisation from achieving the growth and ambition you were aiming for. Lack of knowledge can ultimately result in missed deals, turnover or damage to your company's reputation. 

Obviously, this is slightly overexaggerated, but a good transfer of the knowledge in someone's head is vital to keep your organisation operational.

Do you want to discover in 6 steps how to develop a good offboarding programme? If so, read our blog ‘6 steps towards a good offboarding’. 

5. Streamline your employee experience

If your organisation prioritises the employee experience, you must ensure that it is good from start to finish. This is a continuous improvement process, but it ensures that your employees remain loyal to your company for longer, are more productive and that absenteeism is lower than average. 

You can eliminate frictions by automating and/or standardising processes. Use a platform like Appical to create an interactive employee journey and provide digital support, so that your employees always have access to information. 

Using workflows, you can also automate many things, eliminating many repetitive and manual tasks. As an HR department, you will then have more time for much more important work.

Examples of workflows include automatically planning exit interviews, and automatically activating and planning tasks from when your employee announces they are leaving to their final day at work. Examples of tasks are:

• Returning company property (employee)
• Cancelling access to software and documents (IT)
• Organising an exit interview (HR and/or manager)
• Completing offboarding questionnaire (employee)
• Writing personal farewell message (manager)
• Adding employee to the alumni group (HR)

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Download our free offboarding checklist

Want to streamline your offboarding too? Download our handy offboarding checklist to take the first steps.