Most companies will go on record that they want to attract the best/brightest and then retain them. But oftentimes they don’t retain them -- industry research highlights that a significant portion of full-time employees actively search for or transition to a new job.
When a retaining strategy fails, organizations frequently default to one or more conclusions:
- They left because of money.
- Not a good fit.
- We don’t have a strategy, but we have targets to remain focused on.
While more responses can be added, they all miss a critical opportunity, especially if exit interviews are not utilized properly.
The value of exit interviews
An exit interview, by definition, is with a person who just worked with you for an amount of time -- that might be three months or six years. Regardless, they worked with you and chose to leave. In some cases, those fired are not given exit interviews, but rather escorted from the building. According to research from organizations like Dale Carnegie and others, primary drivers for employee departures are consistently:
- Poor management
- Trust in Leadership
- Poor onboarding experience
- Better financial opportunities elsewhere
But if someone worked for you for several years and chose to leave, they have a ton of institutional knowledge and context around what you do and how you do it -- and maybe even how it could be done better. Examples might include:
- Company policies and workflows
- Training programs
- Internal communication
- Customer service delivery
- Core products and services
- Alignment with the corporate mission
When used strategically, exit interviews provide a wealth of data on organizational strengths and weaknesses, offering actionable feedback to improve retention. Then you could level-set on some of those items in the “poorly” category. After all, if retention is a tracked metric, then shouldn’t we be talking to those who decided to leave about why they decided to leave?
The psychological barriers to effective exit interviews
Despite their potential, exit interviews often fail due to deep-seated organizational psychology and structural flaws:
- The Manager Conflict: If an employee is leaving due to a toxic relationship with their manager, the bond is already broken. A defensive manager may dismiss valid constructive criticism by labeling the departing employee as a "problem employee," rendering the feedback useless.
- In-Group vs Out-Group Bias: Once an employee decides to leave, they transition into the "out group." Remaining staff or HR representatives may subconsciously discount their feedback, adopting an attitude of: "What do they know? They chose to leave."
- The Data Black Hole: Exit interview feedback (if conducted) frequently gets filed away and never reviewed again. Many companies acknowledge higher turnover; exit interviews could be used as a way to figure out what’s happening “on the ground,” but too often no one is tasked with estimating the cost of turnover -- instead, many say “it’s high” without attaching real data to it.
Moving Forward
To transform exit interviews from a routine, checkbox HR exercise into a strategic retention tool, companies must actively address defensive biases, aggregate qualitative insights into quantitative metrics, and tie turnover cost directly to business-making decisions.
How do we make the exit interview better?
Stay tuned. We’ll get to that next time!