The Exiting Employee

In a recent article published by Forbes, “Keeping Ex-Employees Brand Loyal,” the author describes some of the dos and don’ts as to what companies can and should do to protect their brand image when employees leave an organization. This article really resonates with me because it speaks to why brand reputation is such a tender, yet volatile, facet of the employment value proposition. That article makes me think about how organizations manage not only their brand, but how they handle their employees, and with that, certain procedures they use when someone chooses to discontinue his/her employment.

For the sake of this article, I will address the topic of exit interviews. To start, why do companies conduct exit interviews and not use that information to the company’s benefit? If you really don’t care about what exiting employees think, why go to the trouble of asking them, “What could we have done better?”