there is no upside for the person leaving to be candid in an exit interview, nobody wants to burn their bridges, and the amount of change you can effect in the

there is no upside for the person leaving to be candid in an exit interview, nobody wants to burn their bridges, and the amount of change you can effect in the company by leaving is small most of the time (not to mention that having left the employee cannot drive the changes anyways). I personally think the only thing that might be worthwhile is to have an 'exit questionnaire' where you only have a couple of options in 1-5 (strongly disagree / neutral / strongly agree) with very non-threatening / non-personal areas, something like The following are areas that I feel contributed to my decision to leave, and put 'compensation', 'technology', 'recognition', 'career', 'life changes' if your managers are good you should also be able to talk to the person's manager and get some more color on the above, if they have no idea it might be a signal that you might want to double check on how that manager interacts with their reports (regular 1 on 1s? how are the status reports? etc.) If you see a lot of people leave for 'compensation' it's easy to see where the issue is, 'technology' might make you adjust the messaging you do in interviews (not everybody can work on the latest and greatest) for 'recognition/career' you can figure out if your promotions / career ladder are ok, and if somebody is leaving because their life circumstances change, well, not much you can do I think this is better than having a forced session where the employee tries to not burn any bridges and you try to infer what they are really thinking