3 Offboarding Best Practices Every HR Expert Should Know for 2025

In August 2024, Intel shocked the world by announcing that it was cutting its global workforce by 15%—about 15,000 jobs worldwide.

Intel isn’t the only major tech firm that’s letting go of talent at an alarming rate. In an industry once considered the unstoppable engine of modern innovation, data shows that more than 500 big tech companies have so far laid off over 140,000 employees in 2024 alone.

For HR professionals, this troubling trend has raised important questions about the offboarding process. When an employee leaves, human resources teams have an opportunity to gather honest feedback and recommend actions that can halt further turnover—not to mention, offboarding is necessary to ensure compliance and avoid unnecessary legal risks.

Offboarding is an essential part of maintaining your organization’s reputation, optimizing your current employees’ working experience, and preserving networking opportunities.

But how can you fine-tune your organization’s offboarding process to tap into these overlooked benefits? Let’s dive in.

What Is Offboarding in HR?

Offboarding is the process of managing an employee’s exit from your company, whether voluntary or involuntary. This can happen through resignation, termination, or retirement, and the transition is important in shaping your organization’s future success.. Offboarding also extends to the collection of all decisions and processes that take place when an employee leaves. This may include:

• Transferring that employee’s job responsibilities
• Deactivating access rights and passwords
• Turning in equipment
• Conducting exit interviews to gather feedback

Offboarding ensures there are no loose ends when an employee leaves the company, so you don’t find yourself emailing a former employee two weeks later asking for their ID badge, for example. The process is also useful for learning what you might be able to improve for your current and future employees.

Why is the Offboarding Process Important?

When implemented effectively, the employee offboarding process can turn former employees into advocates who may refer new talent to your company. A lack of exit interview best practices can create negative experiences that harm your brand.

An effective offboarding process helps reduce the chance that misunderstandings will persist after the employee moves on. When you take the time to get a clear understanding of the employee’s experience, you and your employee can part ways with additional opportunities for networking, development, and growth. But it’s more than just having an employee offboarding checklist—here are three employee offboarding best practices that can help improve the process.

1. Offboarding Protects Your Company’s Employer Brand

Employer brand refers to how current and potential employees, customers, and the public see your business. Creating a strong employer brand is crucial to attracting and keeping qualified employees. Offboarding is just one aspect of the employee experience that reflects your company’s brand.

Having a strong employee offboarding process is your last chance to leave a positive impression, demonstrating that your organization truly cares about its employees, even after they’ve moved on. This can have a positive ripple effect on how they describe your business and whether they recommend you to others. In fact, a 2022 survey by Aptitude Research estimates about 82% of US employers use employee referrals to identify and shortlist candidates.

To get favorable feedback from former workers and establish a positive employer brand, you must consistently provide a great employee experience in all departments of your company and throughout the employee lifecycle.

2. Offboarding Reveals Pain Points

Offboarding presents a rare opportunity for employees to be truly candid about the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of their experience at your organization. A great workplace doesn’t mask its flaws with effective PR measures. Instead, it takes feedback onboard to improve. And of all departments, HR is likely to best understand the importance of resolving issues instead of covering them up.

To create a fruitful workplace, HR professionals should view offboarding as an opportunity to recognize issues, help departing employees feel heard, and then take measured steps to grow from good to great.

Keep in mind that effective offboarding can’t be a surprise or an afterthought. Your employee offboarding process should flow naturally from your regular pattern of employee communication.

Offboarding is just one of several important conversations that need to happen between employees, managers, and leadership during the employee lifecycle. But while the benefits of regular communication include a stronger sense of purpose and better work outcomes, personal insecurities can cause minor frictions to build up into major issues.

3. Offboarding Leaves the Door Open for Boomerang Employees

Preserving open communication with employees is key when it comes to aligning their talents with the needs of your organization. If an employee’s career path leads them in a different direction than your organization can provide, a careful and thorough employee offboarding process can leave the door open for reconnection.

Employees who changed their workplace weren’t necessarily happier than employees who stayed. Their dissatisfaction largely stemmed from recognition, training, promotions, bonuses and performance reviews. With the reality that the grass might not be greener on the other side, some employees might consider returning to their previous place of work.

Recruiters call these re-hires boomerang employees, and the practice is becoming more common as the competition for talent gets tighter. Again, open communication can make all the difference in a successful re-hire. Keeping track of previous employee performance information can help recruiters weigh them against other candidates.

From Onboarding to Offboarding: the Employee Life Cycle

Onboarding and offboarding are the bookends of an employee’s time at a company.  The terms come from an extended analogy that compares the employee lifecycle with an ocean voyage—they join the organization through the onboarding process and leave through the offboarding process.

While onboarding and offboarding are two very different parts of an employee’s journey, they require a lot of care and consideration. It’s never as simple as a “you’re hired” or “you’re fired.” The step-by-step process of each should be planned from start to finish, and all the paperwork should be carefully organized.

The complexity of onboarding and offboarding processes depends on the organization, but the more time and care you take with these processes, the better experience your employees will have. Both onboarding and offboarding can have elements of uncertainty and risk for employees and organizations alike.

During onboarding, this often manifests in nervous excitement as the new hire and the organization test the new hire’s fit for the role. During offboarding, however, the uncertainty is tied to the decisions that led to the employee leaving. In the case of an employee’s resignation, the employer may wonder if there’s any way they could have convinced the departing employee to stay. And when employees are terminated or laid off, they may question their employer’s true motivations for letting them go.

Next Steps: Create an Effective Offboarding Process

Examining and investing in your offboarding process can lead to a virtuous cycle of learning from your organization’s mistakes and improving them in the future. And whether your employees return with new skills or part forever as friends, offboarding can prove to your former, current, and future employees that your organization values their progression and is interested in changing for the better. Get an offboarding checklist that works with BambooHR.