The last conversation HR has with an employee shouldn’t also be the first.

“By the time someone is sitting with me in an exit interview…we hopefully have a relationship in place, we have built trust, and ideally I’m not hearing about any big theme for the first time,” Jaime Petkanics, chief people officer at vitamin-maker Gruns, said during a recent episode of HR Brew’s People Person podcast. “An exit interview is great, all feedback is a gift, but ultimately the most useful feedback is the feedback you get when there’s still something you can do about it.”

She sat down with Kate Noel, SVP and head of people operations at Morning Brew, to discuss her exit interview strategy, and the one question she wishes she could ask outgoing employees.

How do you start exit interviews?

Once they get into that conversation, you really want to set the stage for here’s what we’re here to do and here’s what I would love to get out of this conversation and here’s what I’m going to do with it. Right? No one is going to be honest with you in an exit interview if they know you’re going to take the full script and verbatim go repeat it back to their manager, their teammates, the leadership team. But obviously, like you said, we don’t want this feedback just like sitting in a dusty old Google Doc doing absolutely nothing. So actually explaining to people a little bit on the backend of what you do with that feedback and how you relay it will hopefully put someone at ease.

How do you think HR professionals should share feedback from exit interviews?

The key is looking for themes across different vehicles of feedback, exit interviews being one of them. One-on-ones that I have with members of the team or that the generalists on my team have with the team is another, our engagement surveys that we do twice a year is another. When I meet with our leadership team and they pass on themes they’re hearing from their team, that’s another. And then the best thing you can do is triangulate that feedback and put it into a format that is usable for change, and that motivates change, right? It’s not successful and it also doesn’t build trust to have one exit interview and then take that back to a leader or to your CEO and say, “Here’s what I learned in this exit interview, because it’s so easy to say, “Well, that’s just one person’s individual experience, so everyone else seems to be fine on that topic.” But if you take a whole quarter to gather the themes and triangulate the feedback…oftentimes what I have learned in exit interviews is thematic and it does align with other things that I’ve heard.

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