Stop Doing Exit Interviews
Employee churn is an inevitable part of building a company. Some departures are involuntary (layoffs, terminations), some are voluntary (resignation), and some are regrettable (subset of voluntary). The latter are the ones that hurt most: talented people that the company would have preferred to retain. Conventional wisdom says these are the scenarios when leaders should conduct an exit interview, asking the departing employee what went wrong and what could have been done differently. While this has become a standard HR practice, I've never believed it is one of the highest leverage things a founder or CEO can do.
The reason isn't that feedback lacks value. Quite the opposite. The challenge is that by the time someone has accepted another offer and decided to leave, the opportunity to influence that outcome has already passed. An exit interview is, by definition, a retrospective exercise. It may produce useful observations, but it does little to improve the experience of the employee who is walking out the door. More importantly, it risks encouraging a reactive culture where leadership only seeks meaningful feedback after someone has already decided to leave.
Founders should instead be asking themselves a different question: why did we not know this six months ago? If an employee's first candid conversation about their engagement occurs during their final week at the company, the feedback process has already failed. Great organizations do not rely on resignation letters to identify cultural problems or management issues. They build systems that surface concerns while employees are still invested in helping the company improve.
This is one of the reasons I have also never been a fan of counteroffers. Counteroffers often feel like an attempt to solve a problem that leadership should have recognized much earlier. If an employee only receives a promotion, compensation adjustment, or expanded responsibility after threatening to leave, the organization unintentionally teaches everyone else that resignation is the fastest path to getting management's attention. I believe companies are better served by investing that energy into building stronger retention systems before employees begin interviewing elsewhere.
Rather than focusing on exit interviews, I would encourage founders to spend significantly more time on engagement surveys, regular one-on-ones, skip-level meetings, and other mechanisms that create continuous feedback loops. These conversations only matter if they result in tangible action. Employees do not expect leadership to solve every problem immediately, but they do expect their feedback to be heard, thoughtfully considered, and reflected in how the company evolves over time. A culture that consistently acts on employee feedback is far more likely to retain exceptional talent than one that primarily learns from departing employees.
A second concern with exit interviews is that they can distort how organizations evaluate managers. Human nature is such that managers inevitably worry about what departing employees will say and how that feedback might influence their own standing within the company. As a result, exit interviews can place disproportionate weight on the opinions of individuals who have already decided that the organization is no longer the right fit for them.
This becomes particularly problematic because some of the strongest people managers also experience relatively high turnover. High-performing teams are often demanding environments. The best managers set ambitious expectations, coach aggressively, and hold their teams accountable. Not every employee wants to operate in that environment, nor should every employee be expected to. Measuring managerial effectiveness primarily through exit interview feedback risks conflating high standards with poor management.
Of course, none of this suggests that founders should ignore management quality. Great CEOs should actively validate what they hear from direct reports by conducting skip-level meetings and maintaining relationships throughout the organization. Those conversations provide a much richer and more representative picture of organizational health because they capture the perspectives of employees who remain committed to the company rather than those who have already chosen to leave.
A final practical challenge is confidentiality. While exit interviews are typically intended to be confidential, it is surprisingly difficult to translate highly specific feedback into organizational improvements without inadvertently revealing who provided it. Even well-intentioned HR teams can find themselves sharing feedback in ways that expose the departing employee or create unnecessary tension within the organization. Once employees lose confidence that these conversations will remain confidential, the process quickly loses credibility.
The strongest argument in favor of exit interviews is that departing employees are often the most candid. Freed from concerns about promotions or performance reviews, they may be willing to share observations that they would have been reluctant to express while employed. There is certainly truth to this. However, I would argue that the existence of this dynamic points to a deeper organizational problem. If employees only feel comfortable being honest after they resign, the company should focus its energy on creating a culture where those conversations can happen much earlier.
None of this is meant to suggest that exit interviews should never occur. They can occasionally uncover patterns or validate concerns that leadership had not previously recognized. However, founders should be careful not to mistake them for a meaningful retention strategy. Exit interviews are inherently backward-looking. By the time they occur, the outcome has already been determined.
The companies that consistently retain exceptional people are rarely the ones with the best exit interview process. They are the ones that invest relentlessly in understanding employee engagement before people begin looking for their next opportunity. In my experience, that is where founders should spend their time.