An exit interview is a structured conversation at departure. Its purpose is not to retain the person but to understand why they are going, in a form comparable with other departures. Someone who is leaving has nothing to lose, which makes it the one moment when problems are named directly.
Why the results are usually useless
For two reasons. First, the conversation is run by the immediate manager — who is not infrequently the reason for leaving. The person answers politely, "found something closer to home", and the note in the file records nothing. Second, the free format: ten free-form interviews do not add up to statistics, so conclusions get drawn from whichever case is most recently remembered.
Hence two simple fixes. The interview is run by HR or by someone a level above, not by the departing person's own manager. And reasons are recorded against a predefined list — otherwise twenty departures cannot be compared with one another.
What to ask
There are only a few useful questions, and all of them are about facts rather than sentiment.
- When the thought of leaving first appeared and what the final trigger was — those two dates are usually months apart.
- What would have had to change for them to stay: a specific condition, not a general wish.
- What turned out worse than expected at hiring: this is the question about the gap between offer and reality.
- Whether they would recommend the company to a friend — the same question as in eNPS, and therefore comparable with current employees' answers.
How this works in Verifix
In Verifix a departure is a personnel event with a recorded reason, so exit interview answers do not sit in a separate file: they join the turnover statistics by unit, tenure and reason.
Next to them sits the same unit's operational data — absenteeism, overtime, schedule stability. Comparing the two is what separates the real reason from the polite one: if a site has lost its third person this quarter and also has the worst overtime, "found something closer to home" stops being a plausible account.
In short
An exit interview produces results under two conditions: it is not run by the manager the person is leaving, and reasons are recorded against a shared list — otherwise they never add up to statistics.