No matter how stellar your company’s reputation is, how compelling the available job opportunities at your organization are, or how thorough the recruiting and hiring process is, employee turnover will always be part of the employee life cycle. By offering a positive offboarding experience, however, you can maintain a positive relationship with departing employees and preserve your company’s standing as a desirable place to work.
In this article, we’ll define what employee offboarding software is and what to look for when choosing the right software for your business. We’ll also discuss the purpose of providing a positive offboarding experience and share a list of the best offboarding software tools to consider.
Employee offboarding overview
What is employee offboarding exactly? It’s the process a departing employee goes through when separating from their place of employment. Offboarding is meant to ensure a smooth transition for both employer and employee while reducing security risks and maintaining legal compliance.
Depending on the business or organization, the formal offboarding process may include completing an exit interview, filling out paperwork, returning company property, and completing other administrative tasks. Other components of the offboarding process involve transitioning the departing employee’s responsibilities to others, deactivating access and accounts, and protecting proprietary company information.
Even though offboarding comes at the end of the employee life cycle, it’s just as important a part of the employee experience as onboarding, and organizations must handle it with care. A respectful, well-managed offboarding experience ensures a favorable lasting impression for departing employees, who are then more likely to spread the good word about your company or organization to others. Together, positive onboarding and offboarding practices help your organization maintain an exceptional employee experience from an employee’s first day to their last, which contributes to a superior brand reputation.
The benefits of a positive offboarding experience
Providing a positive offboarding experience to your employees is essential for preserving your company’s reputation, maintaining compliance with labor laws, keeping the door open for potential rehires, protecting company data, and ensuring the morale of remaining employees remains high.
A positive employee offboarding experience can deliver other benefits:
- Ensures departing employees can transfer their knowledge, which minimizes disruptions across the organization
- Provides an opportunity to gather feedback so you can identify areas for company improvements, including ways to better support current employees and reduce turnover going forward
- Helps you maintain a robust network of alumni who may refer top talent or rejoin your organization in the future
- Reduces legal risks
- Makes it easier to foster employee engagement, company loyalty, and a positive company culture
The benefits of using employee offboarding software
Offboarding software tools help organizations manage and automate the process of employee departures, including tasks associated with conducting exit interviews and surveys, removing permissions and disabling access, updating records, retrieving company property, managing documents and getting signatures, creating offboarding checklists, sending final pay summaries, and more.
Features to look for when choosing the best offboarding software tool
With dozens of tools to choose from, it can be a challenge to select the best offboarding software for your organization. Here are a few key features to look for:
- The ability to update HR records
- Compatibility with other HR tools your organization currently uses, such as payroll software
- Data security functionality that allows compliance tracking, data encryption, and automated access removal, along with other security and access management features
- Customization options that allow you to create personalized workflows and tailor the software to meet industry-specific rules and requirements
- Customizable offboarding checklists
- Knowledge transfer capabilities that allow departing employees to document their standard tasks and projects
- The ability to schedule exit interviews and gather feedback from departing employees
- Asset management functionality to track and manage computer equipment, access cards, documents, and other company property
- Access control capabilities to disable user accounts, permissions, and access to company software, etc.
Best employee offboarding software tools
Many of the best offboarding software tools are part of an overall HR suite of tools that handle both onboarding and offboarding, along with many other HR functions. That said, here are seven employee offboarding software tools to help you manage and streamline the employee exit process smoothly and efficiently.
1. Jotform
From exit interviews to offboarding checklists and more, Jotform provides a complete solution for navigating the employee offboarding process effectively.
For example, it’s easy to conduct exit interviews online with Jotform’s exit interview templates. Customize this free exit interview form and share it via email to collect employee feedback about job satisfaction, reasons for leaving, and more.
Or use this exit interview questionnaire to gather feedback from departing employees about their experience at your organization, then use the insights to better understand the reasons for employee turnover and make necessary improvements. The template is easy to customize and embed — no coding or design skills required.
Use this exit survey template to determine possible factors that cause employees to leave your organization. It features a mix of multiple-choice and single-choice questions as well as fields for longer, typed responses, allowing you to capture rich contextual data that can help improve company culture and workplace environment.
We have a helpful guide if you’d like to learn more about the exit interview process.
Jotform’s employee offboarding checklist form is ideal for ensuring all the elements of your offboarding process go smoothly. This customizable checklist outlines steps for the manager, employee, and HR team to follow to help the employee through the offboarding process, including canceling online accounts, changing usernames and passwords, and more. Following the procedures on the checklist also ensures compliance with applicable employee and company laws.
You can take a deeper dive into how HR departments can use offboarding checklists and how to create a smooth offboarding process on our blog.
Tracking and managing all your form and survey submissions is easy with Jotform Tables, a powerful all-in-one workspace that allows you collect, organize, and manage data in an all-in-one workspace, and you can share it in one click for seamless collaboration. If any of your offboarding tasks require approvals, Jotform Workflows lets you streamline and automate your approval process with ease.
2. Aptien
Aptien is a cloud-based solution that handles onboarding and offboarding for small and medium enterprises in various sectors, including schools and education, manufacturing, construction, medical offices, and more.
Key features
- Offboarding checklists to manage the process of revoking access, changing passwords, deactivating user accounts, and more
- Automated reminders to keep track of important dates and tasks throughout the employee lifecycle
- Knowledge transfer functionality
- Data security and compliance features
- Plus, dozens of other features to help manage employees, equipment, contracts, documents, assets, and projects
Learn more about Aptien features.
Pros
- It’s a customizable, user-friendly tool with a rich feature set.
- It provides good customer support via email.
Cons
- Its compliance management features need improvement.
- There’s no live customer support.
Pricing
There’s a free plan for single users with limited features; paid plans begin at $90 per month for three users. A free trial is available.
Learn more about Aptien pricing.
3. BambooHR
Bamboo HR is a human resources information system (HRIS) for small and medium businesses that bundles several HR features into a single platform.
Key features
- Offboarding automation, including automatic reminders to administrators, managers and other HR stakeholders
- Customizable checklists and notifications
- Offboarding task delegation
- HR data and reporting, including turnover trend metrics like employee performance, length of employment, and reasons for leaving
- Exit surveys
Learn more about BambooHR features.
Pros
- It’s customizable, intuitive, and easy to use.
- The employee self-service portal is robust.
- It offers good customer support.
- A mobile app is available.
Cons
- It lacks in-depth integration with third-party payroll tools as well as customizable options for signature-required documents and performance reviews.
- It’s not optimized to serve large organizations.
- Payroll and benefits are for U.S. employees only.
Pricing
It offers tier-based pricing with two main tiers, Core and Pro. A free trial is available. Payroll (U.S. employees only), benefits administration (U.S. employees only), and time tracking require an add-on to the Core and Pro plans. Plans don’t require an annual contract. You must contact an account executive or book a demo to get a price quote.
Learn more about BambooHR pricing.
4. Factorial HR
Factorial is an all-in-one HR software for a range of industries including marketing and communications, healthcare, manufacturing, tech, and many others.
Key features
- Customization options, including offboarding task flows and task triggers
- Automated timeline of processes for departing employees to keep them updated on exit steps
- Automated notifications to the IT team and other relevant stakeholders when an employee departs to create appropriate access restrictions
- Seamless integrations with third-party apps
Learn more about FactorialHR features.
Pros
- It’s a user-friendly and highly customizable tool.
- It includes automated and customized offboarding flows as well as a mobile app.
Cons
- Additional features are limited or missing.
- Some features need more documentation to understand.
- It’s more suited to the European market rather than the U.S. market.
Pricing
Pricing starts at $4.50 per user per month. Starter Plans begin at $99 per month and include 19 employees. Tailored plans and quotes are available by request. Both a free version and a free trial are available.
Learn more about FactorialHR pricing.
5. HR Cloud
HR Cloud is an easy-to-use platform that offers a comprehensive suite of HR onboarding and offboarding features for companies in healthcare, construction, manufacturing, retail, tech, and other sectors.
Key features
- Detailed offboarding checklists
- The ability to create customized offboarding workflows specifically tailored to the individual organization
- Document trails that record all documents, policy paperwork, and contracts exiting employees have signed during their lifecycle with the organization
- Custom exit surveys to gather important feedback
Learn more about HR Cloud features.
Pros
- It has a simple, intuitive interface, automated workflows, and customized offboarding portals to streamline the offboarding process.
- It offers good customer support.
Cons
- Compliance features are limited to U.S. organizations.
- Mobile app notifications need improvement.
Pricing
According to the HR Cloud pricing page, the pricing structure is based on the size of the organization and the specific solutions they need. You must book a meeting for a quote. A free demo is available.
Learn more about HR Cloud pricing.
6. Okta
Okta is a user-friendly, no-code software tool specifically designed to support offboarding IT team employees in industries including healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, retail, tech, and others.
Key features
- If-this-then-that (IFTTT) logic to easily handle offboarding actions
- Synchronization of data between HR and IT
- Automated workflows for both employees and contractors
- Integrations with other HR systems to support automatically removing access when offboarding employees
- Post-offboarding access reviews to prevent potential security breaches
- The ability to reclaim software licenses from former employees and reallocate them to current employees or new hires
Learn more about Okta’s features.
Pros
- It’s a user-friendly tool with automated employee offboarding, AI-powered data and insights, and simple access management.
- It features over 7,000 integrations.
Cons
Because it’s mostly designed to support offboarding IT teams, Okta must be integrated with your existing HR system to handle offboarding tasks for employees in other departments.
Pricing
Pricing depends upon whether you choose Single Sign-On ($2 per user per month), Multi-factor Authentication ($3 per user per month), or several other available options. B2C, B2B and Enterprise plans are available. A free trial is also available.
Learn more about Okta pricing.
7. Rippling
Rippling is an all-in-one platform for HR, IT, payroll, and spend management for industries including healthcare, manufacturing, tech, and retail, as well as marketing and ad agencies, restaurants, nonprofits, and others.
Key features
- Tailored offboarding workflows
- Offboarding and recruitment connection to easily create open positions after employee departure
- Automated compliance tasks to reduce the risk of legal issues
- Exit surveys
- The ability to generate separation agreements and COBRA documents and calculate final paychecks
- The ability to remove departing employees from company benefits and revoke system and data access
Learn more about Rippling features.
Pros
- It has a user-friendly interface.
- It features one-click access removal, custom workflows to offboard employees, and final paycheck calculation.
Cons
- It has limited analytics and reporting features as well as limited phone support.
- Pricing is only available by request.
- Some users have reported poor customer service and disorganized onboarding.
Pricing
Custom pricing is available upon request. A free demo is available.
Learn more about Rippling pricing.
Photo by Timur Weber
Send Comment: