It's time for exit interviews to exit

Since the mountains were young, HR departments have tried to get the real dish on company morale and conditions through exit interviews -- formal debriefings of departing employees -- but many staffing experts believe it is time to let this practice fade away.

"The reason the company is asking you for this information is supposedly because they want to understand either why you decided to leave or, if they've let you go, they want to know what your thoughts are about your management, your work and so on. HR might argue that there is a benefit there -- I would argue that there's none," said Nick Corcodilos, a Lebanon, N.J.-based recruiter and author of Ask The Headhunter: Reinventing The Interview to Win The Job.

Corcodilos, who also hosts a Web site about staffing issues (www.asktheheadhunter.com), has identified a number of flaws in traditional exit interview procedures. His pet peeves include interviews by HR staff who know the employee only through files and reviews, the filtering of results as they move from HR back to the employee's manager, and the practice's after-the-fact timing which means little or no benefits can accrue to the worker.

"It's like doing an autopsy on someone who just died in a car accident -- you might learn something for the greater good of science but you're not really learning anything about how to improve this person's life -- it's too late," Corcodilos said.

People being people, there is also a serious credibility problem with many post-resignation dialogues, said Terry Szwec, the Toronto representative of Career Systems International, an Los Angeles-based employment consulting firm.

"When you ask employees on an exit interview basis to tell you the factors by which they are leaving, we find 70 per cent of the time people lie -- it's a self-effacing, ego-enhancing exercise for them to look good in the eyes of their former management and their colleagues," Szwec said.

When she left her job with a nonprofit woman's advocacy group in Waterloo, Ont. to return to university, social worker Anu Chahauver didn't lie to her exit interviewers but -- with an eye on her future -- she did have a very deliberate strategy.

"I had already thought about it and decided that I was not going to say anything about the other personalities, and any difficulties in the office, because it was a very small, close-knit organization and I just wanted to leave on a very positive note. Plus, it's a small (professional) community, people move around, and I could be working with some of them again," Chahauver said.

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