In IT sector, exit interviews are thing of the past

Exit interviews in the Indian IT industry are now becoming passé. Many IT companies including Infosys, Wipro and Accenture have ‘unofficially’ stopped taking exit interviews for employees in the last few months.

While HR personnel at firms never conducted exit interviews for staff leaving through involuntary attrition (due to bad performance), this practice is now being extended to those who leave voluntarily as well, according to industry sources. Further, a large part of the voluntary attrition now includes several employees who are being ‘forced’ to leave on the pretext of poor performance and lack of projects.

Companies are not seeing adequate value in these exit interviews, as mostly only negative feedback comes through. Also, there are companies like Mphasis which outsource exit interviews to third party consultants which adds to the cost of operation.

An Infosys employee told Financial Chronicle, “Unlike earlier, employees who leave voluntarily are not given an opportunity to give feedback through exit interviews. Earlier employees were asked to provide reasons for quitting and the delivery manager would take inputs personally. But now an employee just fills a basic form on the internet and then you leave. No emphasis is placed on feedback anymore. The open door policy is there just for namesake.” However, according to people in the know there is no official communication on this practise.

Said Vamshi, who was asked to quit Wipro a couple of months ago, “Companies feel it is a waste of time and money since employees leaving in this recessionary environment will tend to give negative feedback.”
Agreeing with this, a project leader with Accenture said that he was told, unofficially, to stop taking exit interviews for his team.

However, companies like TCS and MphasiS are exceptions. MphasiS’ HR head R Elango said, “People tell you lot of things about the organisation that one doesn’t get to know otherwise.’’ However he concurs that some of his peer firms who are retrenching or optimising their headcount have stopped the process.

Their logic it seems is: Why spend so much on these interviews? he added. Officially, there was no response from Wipro and TCS on the issue. According to Anshuman Das of Careernet, which has forayed into outplacement service for IT industry, an exit interview for a single person in India on average would cost about Rs 3,000 and $200 (over Rs 9,000) for an employee in the US. Most companies outsource their processes to third party HR firms to conduct exit interviews and outplacements.