08/ 16/ 2007
by Pamela Mills-Senn
"Exit interviews are for bad managers," declares Penelope Trunk, a business consultant and columnist with the Boston Globe and Yahoo! Finance. "They're totally outdated. If they (the business owner or manager) cared what the person leaving had to say, they would have asked them before they left."
On top of that, Trunk continues, exit interviews offer departing employees nothing worthwhile—and what they say may be suspect to boot.
"Any employee who is stupid enough to give real information in an exit interview is not worth listening to anyway," says Trunk, also author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success. "How does an exit interview help an employee? It usually creates bad will. If the employee has people to thank, she can do that without an exit interview. You don't need an exit interview to create positive feelings, you need a lunch."
Trunk's observations may border on the emphatic where it concerns the value of exit interviews, but her comments do resonate with some, particularly her feelings that asking employees what they're thinking as they're waving bye-bye is probably not an optimal strategy.
Beverly Kaye, CEO and founder of Career Systems International, a consulting firm based in Scranton, Pa., agrees with Trunk to a degree. She suggests that rather than doing one-time exit interviews that business owners conduct "stay interviews" with all their staff throughout the year.
"I tell people how important it is to ask: 'What can I do to keep you?' But most managers or business owners ask this at the exit interview, and then it's usually too late," says Kaye, author of Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: Getting Good People to Stay.
"Why not try something unique—a stay interview," Kaye says. "In the stay interview, you would ask the same kinds of questions you would in an exit interview, but before they leave. It's a great recruiting tool, and today's small-business owner needs to re-recruit almost from the time of hire.
"But," she adds, "don't ask if you're not prepared to act on the input."
Many business owners are afraid to pose the "what-can-I-do-to-keep-you" question for fear the employee will ask for more money, and that this could put them in a bind if the budget won't allow for wage increases.
"If you can't give more, be honest and say so," Kaye advises. "And then ask what else you can do that would be meaningful to the employee."
So, is the exit interview a dinosaur destined for the tar pits? Not hardly, especially considering the challenges small-business owners face staying connected to their employees.
In principle, Linda Finkle, CEO of the Incedo Group, a Potomac, Md.-based organizational coaching and consulting company, agrees with Trunk.
"A business owner should be in touch with what is working and not working, but this, in my opinion, is an ideal that cannot always be achieved," Finkle says. "There are so many distractions and responsibilities for small-business owners that it's almost impossible to have these kinds of ongoing conversations with employees."
There are other benefits, too. A well-managed exit interview can uncover information small-business owners can act on to improve their operations, such as revealing patterns that may signal trouble, Finkle explains. For example, say there is a bookkeeping position where people keep leaving because they've hit the wall growth-wise, and there's nowhere else for them to go. Knowing this could allow a business owner to either create additional opportunities for that position or, if this isn't possible, hire more appropriately and reduce costly turnover.
"Or, if you start suddenly having a lot of turnover, and you've never done an exit interview, I would say that now is the time to start doing them, and doing them across the board," she adds.
Mike Gilles, director of HR for The Castleton Group, a full-service HR outsourcing firm based in Raleigh, N.C., thinks exit interviews represent a huge communication opportunity for both the company and the exiting employee.
"The purpose from the employer's view is to get candid feedback about the company, and I think candid feedback does happen," Gilles says. "There are variables, of course, the employee's concerns about burning bridges and their expectations, etc. all play into how candid, but in general, they have less to lose and less reason to be cautious."
This is why Gilles believes exit interviews can often result in more telling feedback than surveying existing and staying employees.
The other, secondary goal, for the company is to have the employee leave feeling as good as possible and with positive feelings about the company—important where word-of-mouth is concerned.
And then there's the benefit to employees, he continues.
"It allows them to get things off their chests," Gilles says. "If there were things that weren't positive, the exit interview can give them a chance to address them. It allows them to speak their minds and feel that maybe something will be done with it, and to also say good things about the company. This communication process can be the final capstone on the relationship for the employee."
Gilles says employers should consider doing exit interviews for every position. However, it may not be appropriate to conduct these for every employee, as in the case of someone leaving involuntarily due to firing or layoff. Although, he adds, some human resource people suggest doing them anyway in these instances.
"But I think in this situation, you need to look at each involuntary termination individually and consider whether the exit interview would be more harmful than helpful," he says.
Finkle agrees with the slightly selective approach. "If you have someone who has only been with you a few months, and they're marginal, do you really care what they have to say?"
How valuable the exit interview is to all parties greatly depends on the skill of the interviewer, his ability to make the employee comfortable and to listen and take feedback without getting defensive, Gilles says. Don't argue or try to convince the employee he is wrong, Finkle says. The exit interview is about listening without commentary, she explains. But this doesn't mean you don't respond, Gilles says, who explained that it's a mistake to act disinterested or to not ask follow-up questions.
"Still, you need to be balanced and not overreact to one person's input," Gilles says. "Evaluating and weighing the information is important. You should know the source and when the feedback should be discounted. But, if you're going to discount all the input from all the exiting employees, than you are probably in denial."
(And if the information gleaned from exit interviews is never used, other employees will pick up on this pretty quickly, Finkle says. "Not only will you risk loosing them but you can create morale problems by not doing anything.")
Also, there are times when not acting on input could place the company at legal risk, Gilles warns.
"If you learn of a problem, such as an allegation of criminal behavior, or discrimination or harassment and don't do anything about it, then the exit interview can come back to haunt you," he says.
As for who should conduct the interviews, obviously it shouldn't be the person to whom the employee immediately reports. The further up the chain of command you go the better, Gilles says.
If the business lacks an HR department (and, yes, it's possible to outsource the exit interviews, Gilles says), it should be done by someone who is involved with company policy, management and/or employee concerns.
