The Exit Interview
Almost every time a resignation letter lands on an executive’s desk, they’re left feeling surprised. And, they’d tell you that if there were in a position to be candid. In many cases, they didn’t see it coming. Why? Because, from the C suite, the employee seemed fine. The employee seemed busy, maybe a little quiet lately, but fine overall. And now they're gone in two weeks and the business scrambles to figure it all out. Somewhere in the scramble HR schedules the exit interview, because that's the process. Maybe it’s a face to face exit interview, or less feelingly, an after-the-fact mailed or emailed questionnaire. Either way, at the very end, HR finally asks the employee why they're leaving.
I'll tell you the quiet truth about most exit interviews. By the time you're having one, you're conducting an autopsy. You're asking why the patient died, carefully, respectfully, with a form to fill out, when the only question that ever mattered was one you could have asked while the employee was still engaged, productive, and reachable.
Because here's the thing about employees who leave "out of nowhere." It was never out of nowhere. The decision to leave gets made long before the letter is written, usually over months, in a slow accumulation of small moments. The project they wanted that went to someone else. The manager who never quite had time or who micromanaged every comma. The growing sense that they'd plateaued professionally and nobody seemed to care. By the time they're sitting across from you in the exit interview, telling you in measured, professional language what went wrong, the answers are real, but it's also six months stale, being delivered in uninvested language, and there is nothing left to do with it except file it. But what if I told you it wasn’t? What if I told you there are real lessons to be learned and real action to take before it happens again?!
I once sat with an employee who was leaving, the kind of structured exit conversation companies do, and he started by telling me he had nothing to say. No complaints, no drama, it was just time to move on. We sat there for fifty-two minutes. And somewhere in that time, when it became clear I wasn't filling out a form, that I actually wanted to understand, the real story came out, the long quiet version of why a good employee stops believing they matter here. The employee had a great deal to say in the end. Nobody had ever asked him in a way that made him believe the answer would land anywhere.
That's the part that should sting. The information you're finally getting in the exit interview was available the whole time. The employee was carrying it. Most employees would have told you if anyone had asked the question early enough and in a way that felt safe, genuine, and intended to help them…not simply as part of an exit checklist. "How are you, really? Is this still the right place for you? What part of your job is most meaningful to you?" That conversation, had six months earlier, is a retention conversation. The same words, spoken during the notice period, are an autopsy.
The fix is not a better exit interview. The fix is a stay interview, though I don't love the corporate name for it. Call it whatever you want. The point is that you sit down with the employees you'd hate to lose before there's any sign they're leaving, and you ask them the real questions, and you make it safe to answer honestly.
Not the annual review, which is about the past and the rating. A different conversation, about whether they still want to be here and what it would take to keep that true. Most companies have this conversation exactly once per employee, on the way out, when it's too late to matter.
So if you only take one thing from this, take this. The most valuable conversation you can have with a great employee is the one you have while you can still do something about the answer. Don't wait for the resignation to get curious about the employee. By then you're not learning how to keep them. You're just learning, for the file, why you couldn't. But, if you missed the opportunity to have a stay interview, don’t miss your chance to learn from the departing staff member, what you could do better.