Importance of Exit Interviews

An exit interview generally denotes a face-to-face feedback garnering session with those employees who are leaving the organization. It’s the last step conducted at the termination of an employment cycle.

What is the basic purpose of exit interviews? Is there any reason at all to spend time and effort for taking feedback from employees who are ceasing to be a part of the organization? The answer is, an exit interview, if conducted properly, can serve as a golden opportunity to extract relevant and valuable information from the departing employee. Information about a plethora of things like the organization’s areas of strengths and weaknesses, satisfaction and dissatisfaction about organizational and management policies, attitude of employees towards the culture of the organization, employee turnover reasons etc. can be elicited from the employee which can be the key to the organization improvement.

Now, it can be argued that this pulse checking of the employees can be done through various employee satisfaction surveys also. Then why a separate exit interview is needed? One reason why exit interview is needed is that the chances of an employee giving a frank and honest feedback are greater when an employee is severing ties with the organization. Often, the reasons of dissatisfaction that have prompted the employee to leave the organization cannot be uncovered during the tenure of his or her employment. In this context, two points are worth mentioning:

–         Though it’s a good practice to conduct exit interviews for all employees, it’s particularly important to pay attention to those employees who have been good performers but are leaving the organization on their own accord as opposed to those who have been terminated by the organization for some reason. A major concern for any organization is to retain well-performing employees – so gauging the level and reason of dissatisfaction of those employees is of utmost importance. Exit interviews can supply the organization with means and clues to fight the problem of attrition.

The employees who have been terminated by the organization can also throw light on issues like reasons behind poor performance or lack of engagement. If some of those issues can be attributed to organizational policies, then exit interviews are helping the organization in identifying those issues so that corrective steps can be taken.

–         Exit interview cannot undo the damage already done. It is too late to take any action to retain the employee who is on his or her way out of the door. The organization has probably lost an asset. So, the best time to discuss concerns and suggestions and to find out remedial measures is when the employee is still a part of the organization.

If an organization finds out during the exit interview that the employee is joining some competitor organization, it is then time to analyse its internal policies, compensation structures, in which areas is it lagging behind its peers and what measures can be taken so that employees start preferring the current organization over other organizations.

So, it is now evident that the basic purpose of exit interviews is to elicit information that will help in the improvement of organization. The secondary purpose of exit interviews is to get an idea about whether the employees are planning to sue the organization or what negative image of the organization has the employee got in his or her mind. Negative publicity about organization can affect its brand value – so it needs to be countered at the earliest.

What is the correct way of conducting an exit interview? First of all, the employee needs to be assured that he or she is not going to face any negative consequence for all the feedback shared during the interview. It will encourage the employee to open up and share feedback frankly. Next question is who is going to conduct the interview? It’s not at all wise to have the employee’s supervisor or manager conduct the interview. If the issue the employee has was with the supervisor, then the issue is never going to get uncovered during the interview. Second option is the Human Resources department. Chances of employees opening up here are more but still since HR is the one who keeps all employee references, employees may have reservations against giving unfiltered feedback to it. If a neutral third party can be engaged for the purpose, then it might yield better result. But, the cost of engaging a third party for conducting interview and the benefit derived from the exit interview is to be compared first.

So, in order to become an ‘Employer of Choice’, it is necessary to conduct exit interviews in a meaningful manner so as the unearth the real reasons behind the human resources quitting the employer and to subsequently work on those reasons so that those issues never see a repetition again.