Why An Offboarding Strategy Is Essential for Your Employer Branding

A great deal of time and effort is focused on the candidate experience during talent acquisition and employee retention strategies. But we seldom talk about what happens when an employee leaves a company and how it can affect your company’s employer branding. Employees might decide to leave the company due to various reasons but regardless of why they are leaving – termination or voluntary departure – you best believe that they will have something to say about your organization. Whatever they have to say largely depends on how they remember their last few days. This is why a wrong offboarding process can risk damaging your employer branding. And of course, we know that a hit to the company’s reputation can leave a negative mark on talent acquisition and even employee retention. Do you apply the “out of sight, out of mind” move or are you just unsure of what happens next? Just like the hiring process, offboarding is a part of the employee journey, but it is often neglected. Whereas the onboarding process sees employers try to make good impressions by enticing new hires further.

However, offboarding is an equally important step in boosting your company’s employer branding.

In this article, we will discuss why an offboarding strategy is essential for your employer branding and for keeping a strong business reputation.

What is employee offboarding?

Irrespective of the reasons behind the decision for an employee to leave an organization, employee offboarding marks the exit of an employee from an organization. You might be under the impression that you do not have an employee offboarding process, but the truth is that whether you choose to formalize it or not, the employee offboarding process will always write itself. When you fail to put an employee offboarding process in place, it can generally happen in a way that’s bad for your employer branding.

Why do you need an offboarding strategy?

The purpose of an offboarding process can be seen two-fold:

• It helps to improve the hiring practices and employee experience
• It helps to leave a positive impact on the departing employee

Departing employees leave valuable data on the table that can help employers improve their hiring process and employee experience. Without any offboarding, companies tend to miss out on the golden opportunity to gather the information that they could use to step up their employee lifecycle, including the candidate experience. As mentioned earlier, the thought of how an employee spent their last few days in an organization will linger in their mind for a while and these thoughts will often mask their entire experience and conversations about the company over the next months. However, with an offboarding process in place, exiting employees are provided with some sort of closure. This experience can greatly impact the perception of existing employees and improve employer branding.

Steps to get better employer branding with offboarding

It can be hard to watch employees leave an organization. But looking on the bright side, a formalized employee offboarding process can bring great value and improvement to your employer branding – especially when it is done correctly. Let’s dig into the steps you can follow for a stellar offboarding process. Have an exit interview Conducting an exit interview is the most essential step in the offboarding process. The information you are able to gather from the interview can help you connect the dots and drive change to increase engagement for the current and future employees. This information will remain valuable to you because you can detect issues with your company culture that need improvement. At the end of it all, this will influence your ex-employee experience and help you detect issues to improve your employer branding. Recognize their contribution Appreciating the role employees play in the company will further help them remember the good times in the company in the future. So it is vital that you make a conscious effort to make them feel good about the time they spent in your organization. For example, organizing an impromptu office party with a surprise farewell gift will help keep the memory fresh in their mind. Keep in touch You can make a list of ex-employees where you can stay in touch and share company news from time to time. This is a small yet effective effort to stay closer in contact with former team members. Ex-employees who opt in for this might just be signaling that they might not be too hard to lure back if a better opportunity arises.

To wrap it up

Unlike the onboarding process where you get a few shots helping employees settle in, offboarding only comes with one shot. You either get it right, or you don’t. This is why it is important to carefully set up an inclusive and memorable offboarding process. Also, your ex-employee could become a valuable asset, trusted partner, ambassador, or a huge customer for your company. And to increase the chance of this happening, you have to first create a great employee offboarding process to strengthen and improve your employer branding. EVA-REC is a futuristic ATS that automates and improves the hiring process with AI technology. It arms leading enterprises with world-class features that help them create a rich and immersive hiring experience for recruiters and candidates alike. With EVA-REC, companies can drive merit-based, objective, and fair hiring practices that minimize bias, without dehumanizing the hiring process. Request a free demo today to get a full grasp of why industry leaders around the globe depend on us to hire the people they can depend on.

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