An expert has advised employers that the practice of staging exit interviews with workers poised to leave their company actually serves little practical purpose and is largely a wasted endeavour.
Jarrod Parker, actuaries and consultants chief at Alexander Forbes, told the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development's annual conference in Manchester that engaging with departing staff does not usually offer a great deal of insight.
"We do exit interviews; we all do that," he told delegates at the event last week. "But you're asking the wrong people, because those people that are leaving are the ones who at least have an axe to grind."
Mr Parker added that some employees who are poised to seek pastures new tend to be "very emotional" when making an assessment of their time at a particular organisation.
Last month, research from financial services giant PricewaterhouseCoopers found that UK firms' failure to retain staff and the associated costs deprive them of a combined £42 billion each year.
Posted by Hayley Edwards
In my experience the worth that exit interviews provide depends on how they are conducted and how the data is used. I agree that an interview conducted by an untrained line manager of HR manager at time of leaving and notes stored in the individual’s file has low value.
Some pointers for doing it well:
Interviewer should be independent and trained in identifying core drivers
Data should be coded and stored in a way to identify organization-wide trends. Transcribing conversations to enable text-mining may be worthwhile
An interview conducted 3 months after leaving removes emotion and can be a good time to identify rehired (remember somewhere in the region of 25% of people leave a new job in the first 12 months)
The value from an exit interview is not in what can be done with the leaver but instead identifying trends that can reduce the probability of others leaving.