Are there any downsides to conducting exit interviews?
If an exit interview is conducted face-to-face there is a tendency for employees to be reluctant to reveal the real reasons for leaving, and instead offer a ‘politically correct’ reason for leaving. A typical answer might be ‘better pay’ or ‘better job opportunity,’ when, in reality, it might be that the manager or supervisor is a micromanager and the employee does not work well under that kind of scrutiny. Or perhaps there has been some sort of harassment that the employee is hesitant to divulge for fear of future negative action. The traditional method of having an assigned HR representative or the employee’s supervisor conduct the exit interview (usually on the last day), can provide a number of challenging difficulties: It is time-consuming, difficult to tabulate and not always executed consistently. If face-to-face exit interviews don’t necessarily give businesses the honest answers they need, what is the alternative? Many employers have found that using a third party to conduct t
