Exit interviews bring back value to companies

Akshay Dubey is on cloud nine. Interviewed by an MNC for the post of Regional Manager he has landed the job — and has got the confirmation letter too. There’s only one small hurdle to cross — he needs to tell his new employer why he is quitting his current job.

The bigger hurdle, though, is the exit interview that he must go through with his current employer. The truth is, Dubey was unhappy with the work culture in his office. This spurred him to look for a new job. But Dubey likely wouldn’t want to burn his bridges by speaking the truth too plainly.

Exit interviews make employees quitting a company anxious. Most executives consider it something unavoidable. They think it has no meaning but is considered among industry best practices. And very often those leaving an organisation usually take this interview with two intentions:

— to give a socially acceptable answer, sugar-coating the real answers only to have good relations with the organisation, just in case they need a favour sometime later

— to go all out against the organisation and complain more than what is actually the case. This is essentially because the responses from employees are hugely biased and mostly do not represent the correct picture.

Valuable insight However, exit interviews, if conducted properly, can lead to meaningful insight into the psyche of employees at any particular grade, in any particular branch, in a given region and of the particular business vertical in question.

This information that an HR professional receives is not a mere data point but an important indicator of what is wrong with the organisation.

Such information may not be easily available from the present employees as they wouldn’t want to sour their relationship with the management. However, when a person has decided to leave the organisation, there would have been certain triggers that would have led to this decision. These employees would be relatively open in their approach to disclose the real reasons for leaving.

However, we also need to consider that not every response in the exit interview is genuine. As pointed out earlier, people may want to leave on a good note and hence not talk about the actual problem or they may simply exaggerate the problem, bad-mouth peers/superiors as they leave the organisation. It is the skill of the HR executive to separate the wheat from the chaff.

To sum it up, exit interviews can be a very important tool for any organisation, provided the employees give genuine feedback on their reasons for leaving the organisation, the organisation gives sufficient importance to the exercise of taking exit interviews and the HR executives actually try to get important insights from the data generated through exit interviews and act upon it.

( Shivang Ganatra is pursuing PGD in Human Resource Management at IIM Ranchi )

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