Exit interview is a survey conducted with the departing employee of an organization to collect the information regarding why the employee is leaving the organization. It is conducted not only when an employee is leaving an organization but also at the time when his or her contract date expires. The main reason to conduct such a survey is to gather information which could be helpful in increasing overall effectiveness of the organization. Such a collection of data over a period of time can …

really help the organization in improving in areas where the departing employees had problems with the organization. One should not get confused thinking that in exit interview you only have to say negative aspects about the organization. Exit interview is a wonderful opportunity for the departing employees to talk about positive aspects of the organization and leave the organization on the right note.
These days exit interviews have been used effectively to not only collect human resource information but also to capture the knowledge behind executing a job. So over the years this has been a knowledge management tool for the organizations. Such interviews could also prove helpful if the organization has to go through the legal hassles with the departed employee as the information given by the departing employee is kept and is authenticated. Hence in one aspect or many, exit interviews are very helpful to any organization come what may be its nature or size. In today’s competitive environment no organization would like to lose its competent staff. In order to minimize this cost of losing a staff, the organization can use the exit interview to its fullest.
Exit interview and organizational effectiveness are very much related. Organizational effectiveness means how well an organization is able to convert its inputs into output. There are many predictors by the help of which organizational effectiveness can be measured (as organizational effectiveness in itself is an abstract term). Such predictors could be employee satisfaction, employee turnover rate, productivity, organizational commitment of the employee, motivation level in the employees etc. The information collected in exit interviews has been found to be positively affecting these predictors.

Exit Interview in Nepal
Exit interview is relatively a new human resource tool in Nepal’s corporate houses. There very few organizations which have been using exit interviews. Amongst these organizations, I along with my other three friends did a research in one of the leading hotels and the other a well known call center. These two industries have traditionally high turnover rate.
The exit interview, although a budding concept in Nepal, has been taken pretty seriously by the hotel industry and the call center and the impact of exit interview on these industries is very encouraging. The exit interview has been found to be drastically decreasing the turnover rate and at the same time it has helped to uplift the employee satisfaction. That was possible as the exit interviews were conducted systematically and scientifically plus the records of the exit interviews were maintained. The productivity in call center also has been found to have gone up after the inception of exit interview but in hotel industry the exact impact of exit interview on employee productivity is hard to find. This is because a hotel business is a seasonal one and how much of interaction an employee has with the customers is not quantifiable. On that note it can be said that exit interview is more helpful to a call center vis-à-vis a hotel. But the overall increment in the organizational effectiveness is due to the fact that the suggestions (feasible) given by the staffs at the time of leaving or at the time of renewal of their contracts are implemented and reviewed.
In a nutshell “If you want to grow your business tomorrow, you must invest in your people today”.