Gone, but not forgotten ... The importance of exit interviews

Three years ago, whilst I was working for my previous company, one of my team decided that she wanted to leave and go back to university in order to study for a master’s degree. Naturally, I was disappointed to lose a valuable member of my team. However, as she clearly had her heart set on this new direction, I was happy to let her depart with my blessing and best wishes. Once she had officially offered her resignation I presumed everything was complete. Not quite. I soon got a call from HR asking me to undertake an exit interview.

This surprised me a little. In the past, my only experience of this type of process had been on the receiving end. In my mind, the exit interview was the domain of HR rather than the line-manager. So, to get a little help, I called our HR manager in Shanghai:“Hi Amy, I am looking for a little guidance on the exit interview you asked me to do.”“Ok, no problem. What we need you to do is find out why Sally (the employee) quit, and any information that might be useful in helping us attract and retain employees in the future.That seemed simple enough. And, to give me extra help, Amy emailed me a list of potential questions. So, I sat down with Sally and began the interview. Everything went great! She explained her reasons for leaving in great detail and gave some excellent feedback on the company’s corporate culture and on me as a line manager. This was good to hear. However, as she continued, I began to feel that perhaps it was a little too good to hear.

If Sally did have concerns about the company’s culture, opportunities for development, or the way she was treated by management, I was hardly the right person to be asking her.This reminded me of the exit interview at my last job in the UK. It was conducted by my department manager. I had left the company because I felt that the development opportunities I had been promised when I was recruited had not been delivered. This would have been useful information for the company to help them with future recruitment. However, the person responsible for hiring me and subsequently failing to deliver on his promises was sat right in-front of me – we were even in his office! There was no way that I felt comfortable sharing my thoughts with him in that environment. So, I simply told him I was “looking for a new challenge” and headed out of the door. My boss sat back in his chair with no idea why he had lost another employee and no way to stop others following.

These two exit interview experiences taught me that there are two key elements to an exit interview that must be in place before you even ask a question (i) the environment, and (ii) the interviewer.

(i) The environment: The key here is simple – it needs to be somewhere the departing employee feels comfortable. As Amy said, the whole point of an exit interview is to find out why the employee decided to leave and find useful information that might help to attract and retain other employees in the future. If they do not feel comfortable – like me in my manager’s office – they are less likely to share. As a consequence, you will get less useful information and run the risk of losing more employees.
(ii) The interviewer: In both scenarios discussed above, the choice of a manager to conduct the interview was a poor one. Very few departing employees would feel comfortable telling their line-manager that they are leaving because of a personality conflict, because of a lack of opportunity or because of poor organizational culture. Instead, a much more neutral figure is needed – HR being the obvious example.As the old saying goes, “Prevention is better than cure.” A successful exit interview may not help you to cure the problems of the departing employee, but it could certainly help prevent problems amongst others in the future!