BEYOND EXIT INTERVIEWS

In many cities, counties and states, human resource departments traditionally require that departing employees do exit interviews before they walk out the door for the last time. Sometimes this involves filling out a simple form and elsewhere there’s a brief conversation involved.

One of the potential benefits of these exercises is to help cut down on turnover, by fixing any problems that led to a departure.

But, ultimately, how useful are these efforts? From what we’ve been able to tell, often they aren’t actively used to gain significant benefit. That’s because they aren’t treated as analytical tools from which information can be garnered, but are similar to other administrative records, filed away in a hard drive, but not actually driving any actions going forward.

For one thing, even when an employee has the opportunity to download all the genuine reasons they are leaving, there can be a fear of their words offending someone. One of the major reasons people leave jobs in both the public and private sectors, is contained in the old mantra that “people don’t leave organizations, they leave managers.”

It would be tremendously useful for a city, county or state to identify toxic supervisors in the process of doing exit interviews. But as a recent audit in Multnomah County indicated, “The county offers exit interviews, but they are not always anonymous. Because people have an incentive to maintain a reference, they may not feel comfortable sharing their honest reasons for leaving”.

It seems to us that by the time someone is leaving a job, one of the few benefits of being truthful about bad managers is to help protect future employees from suffering in the way they did. That’s an altruistic notion but altruism can often take a back seat to self-serving motives.

One way to get around this issue is to attempt to reach out to former employees three to six months after they’ve left the job. According to an April 2026 blog from Formbricks, a survey platform used to collect feedback on a wide variety of topics, the advantages of this effort include that

• “It reduces the pressure to be polite”

  
  

• “The employee has started on their new role and can compare honestly.”

  
  

• “Anonymous delivery at this point feels lower-stakes and produces more candid answers.”

  
  

• “Research on exit interview validity supports delayed measurement.”

Another issue with the traditional approach to exit interviews is that the notes from them are often not aggregated in such a way that lessons will be learned. (The obvious exception is when there is explicit discrimination or harassment). That means that department heads may not be able to see useful patterns that could, in the best of worlds, be drawn from exit interviews.

When forms are used to find out the reasons why people are leaving, it’s critical to get deep into the weeds if there’s going to be any benefit from them. Simply learning that someone left because they took another job or for “personal reasons,” doesn’t get the kind of information that any good HR department should want to know.

Consider the situation when a staffer simply explains that they are seeking better work/life balance. Without gathering more information that can mean a great many things, including overlong days, without extra compensation that can lead to burnout.

One alternative to exit interview are so called “stay interviews,” a still relatively rare but promising way of tapping employees on why they aren’t set on leaving. In 2025, Mission Square Research Institute found these were used by 13% of local and state governments surveyed. That’s in contrast to the 77% that employ exit interviews.

According to a post published on June 23, 2026  in the California Public Agency Labor & Employment Blog, the concept is that stay interviews can lead to “a conversation with a current employee designed to better understand what keeps them engaged, what challenges they are experiencing, and what might cause them to leave. ‘Stay interviews’ can provide valuable information that agencies can use to improve employee satisfaction and reduce turnover.”

As the blog explains, “The goal is not to collect perfect data. The goal is to identify trends and opportunities for improvement before retention issues become resignation letters.”

We have liked this idea for a long time and would take it one step further. Many public sector entities engage in regular performance evaluations of their employees, in which their work to date is evaluated and goals for the future are established. Why not use these opportunities as a collaborative exercise, in which the likelihood of someone departing their employer is gauged and the reasons why are – to the greatest extent possible – elicited.

We don’t want to overstate the issues with exit interviews. There are certainly entities that avoid many of the snares we’ve outlined above. But for the remainder, we want to argue that exit interviews that are effectively used as a diagnostic tool, and fashioned in a way to elicit accurate information, can be a constructive way to help increase retention. Ultimately, no matter how effectively a government hires the best and brightest, if they don’t stick around for a while, then that’s a sad loss.

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