In the late 1980s a manufacturing company in Australia was losing its IT staff hand over fist. The company, though, made no attempt to find out why this was so.
The fact was it had a poor corporate culture, it made unreasonable demands on its IT people, and without appropriate recompense, and provided virtually no opportunities for career development. Rather than conduct exit interviews and face up to this, though, IT management just put its head in the sand, despite the cost and consequences.
The process of interviewing people who have tendered their resignation can often provide a useful insight into where an organisation is going right or wrong, as well as unearth the real reason people have resigned. If several are leaving from the same area, for example, two or three interviews can confirm what the underlying problems are, as well produce gems of information along the way.
-Exit interviews enable you to track patterns over time and if necessary, take remedial action to put in place new employment practices. Individuals may have been headhunted to a better paid job or more senior role but that may mean you need to address your pay and advancement structures," says Ian Moore, director human resources, Getronics Australia, which prides itself on having one of the lowest turnover rates in the IT industry.
Eric Dimitroff, HR software company PeopleSoft's human resources manager for Australia and New Zealand, agrees that organisations can use exit interviews to study motivation and moral and identify whether salaries, training and career prospects are sufficient.
However, care must be exercised in interpreting the content, which might consist of a lot of payback and bitterness. People can also lash out on their last day. Being somewhat of a lady's man, the senior programmer in one company who had resigned took the young human resources woman conducting the exit interview to the pub. A few drinks later he completely bared his soul and the result was that she quoted him verbatim in her interview report, naming all the individuals he had attacked in his pub outburst. The report went right up the line to the managing director and caused uproar.
Even when exit interviews are conducted in more conventional circumstances, it is not always the full story that emerges. In many companies interviewees know their line manager will get to see the report and, not wanting to damage their chances of a future reference, may be reluctant to be candid. Other organisations go through the process of exit interviews but don't collate all of the information.
Moore believes it's important to analyse exit interviews together rather than in isolation, and like Dimitroff says they can be very time consuming. He admits that some interviewees can be defensive, but finds most tend to be honest.
While Getronics has always tended to remove the exit process from its line managers, it has now outsourced it altogether. Offsite Talent Check conducts the exit interviews for Getronics in a standard format, the records come back to Getronics' HR people who analyse them over time but don't reveal the contents to the line managers. As well as taking the burden away from the company, Moore says it has led to greater objectivity as people are more frank in speaking to someone completely outside the company.
Brisbane-based HRM Consulting also provides a service for clients in which it surveys former employees between one and 12 months after they leave an organisation.
-People are not interested in burning bridges at the time they leave, but if they are contacted by an independent body after the event and are able to remain anonymous through a survey, the results are always more objective and of greater value," says Anastasia Ellerby, a director of HRM Consulting.
While companies with high staff turnover, which may need feedback the most, usually don't bother with the exit process, Dimitroff estimates that only half of companies that do, conduct exit interviews effectively. Moore also thinks they are rarely practised diligently and over time. However, he considers them to be just one aspect of good HR practice and attracting and retaining people with hard-to-find IT skills.
