Thank you so much Manjari for sharing. Exit interviews if done analytically and objectively, we can get the desired results out of it. But conducting the exit interview as a mere ritual will not serve any purpose except being futile and time consuming exercise. I came across lot of discussions about this topic in these forums and I would like to share one such link on the same.
http://hrlink.in/topics/exit-interview-techniques
Cheers!
Pradeep

first of all i congratulate you for making an effort and contribute to your last company in retaining the employees which is really not an easy task. and about the topic i would just say in short that whatever you have mentioned is very much true and no organization should try to avoid it considering as a cost or time waste and rather try to gain the advantages out of it as your last company did.

really useful and an eye opener...thank u

Great info and very true..Thanks...

Dear Sri,

Thanks for a good post on HR related topic.

Exit interviews in most of the organizations are nothing but a mere ritual as rightly pointed out by Pushpak. Sad, but true.
According to me, an exit interview is more important than the preliminary rounds of interviews conducted at the time of recruitment. Its more important because you are talking to you own employee, who has been there, done that, seen all. The perspective that you get from an employee who is leaving, most of the times is unbiased. Whatever the reason for the employee to leave the organization, the exit interview should be given the time and effort it deserves, because it is the most honest feedback you would get from an employee about your organization. At the time of leaving an organization, an employee is not unduly worried about voicing his opinion and hence he would speak the truth. Truth, which many organizations do NOT want to hear. Hence the value of an exit interviews is always undermined in such organizations. There is a popular saying "Employees do not leave organizations, but leave their managers". In spite of how much we detest this truth, it is very much prevalent and more and more people leave managers to find others, although there is no guarantee that your next manager in the next organization would be better, or less cynical, or less concerned about your career. An employee simply gets fed up and puts down his papers.
One other thing I feel should change in organizations it the timing of the Exit Interviews. Usually it is done on the employees' last working day or a day before that. Hence it just becomes a ritual. I am sure if a professional counselor talks to the employee as soon as he/she puts down his papers, am sure we should be able to make a difference in the statistics of holding them back to a significant extent. How many organizations actually invest in either maintaining a professional counselor/outsource this need to an external agency ? NIL.
Having said that, there are HR professionals who take this ritual rather seriously and try to get an idea about the probable causes that led to this irreparable damage. I call it irreparable because it takes a huge organization cost to hire a new person, train him, to put him on the job and by the time he starts being productive, it would take months of effort. Whereas, if we are able to retain the existing employee, it would mean that many months of productivity. Sounds simple ? Yes it might be simple, provided organizations started putting more emphasis on employees leaving their organizations than on hiring. The emphasis has always been on hiring, to bring in human bodies into the system. The very approach to the exit interviews have to change for organizations to cut on their humongous training costs and instead invest that money on retaining employees who are ready-made to give the productivity, that you are so afraid to lose.

Regards, Harish