Exiting the interview

Okay, I’m going to do a data dump on my final couple of days with my employer, and hope I get it entirely out of my system. Today will be the HR process; tomorrow my former colleagues.

Last Monday, I informed the head of HR that I’d be leaving around noon on my final day because I had a dentist appointment (scheduled six months ago and not able to reschedule before my insurance coverage ended), so whatever exit process they had should probably take that into account. Tuesday I received this from one of the HR staff:

“[HR head] informed us of your resignation. We are sorry to see you go, but we wish you all the best in your next opportunity!

“I’d like to schedule an exit interview with you, as your thoughts and impressions of [Company] are invaluable to positive change.”

Yes, in a department of, at most, 10 people, either no one talks to anyone else, or they just don’t care and only have a single boilerplate email to send out to all employees, regardless of the circumstances of their departure.

Prior to that interview, I had to complete an “employee exit survey”, which was every bit as pointless as I’d expected. Viz:

To Q3 I answered “unclear”. In the interview on Wednesday the HR chick asked if I’d like to explain. “Well, it was SM, then I don’t know. Then I got an email from JC announcing she was my ‘acting supervisor’, but I don’t know what that means.”

Blank stare. I expect one of the many, many workshops that these people go to annually includes how to do this.

The one-size-fits-all approach evident in the email permeated the survey. As in (required) Qs 5, 6, 10 and 12:

Note that Q 10 is required, and it has no provision for N/A. I told HR chick that they need verbatim options to all their questions. Blank stare. Q12 is just taking the piss.

It started getting juicy on Qs 13 and 14:

Although of course there wasn’t space to specify which “supervisor” was being rated, in reality it was the one who’d brought me on and not my jumped-up colleague, who would fall beneath any standard of measurement.

I got no beef with Q15, although I’m not sure what the point was. As for Q16—it was a lead-in to 17:

Aside from the company contributions to the 401(k), benefits there were bog standard, and salaries (at least in business and technical areas) are below market. (It's a not-for-profit organization, but even so...) I limited myself to commenting that, in the 21^st Century, when all our applications are in the cloud, I didn’t understand why there was such resistance to remote working.

In the interview, HR chick said, “We’re working on that.”

Yeah—except that HR has been the biggest obstacle to remote work within the organization, so probably not.

The questions about formal and informal feedback from managers were utterly pointless, because—in my group—I got formal feedback during the flurry of the annual performance evaluation exercise, and nothing in between. (BTW: my manager misspelt my name all three times she used it on the form.) We were supposed to have quarterly check-ins, but that was a pipedream.

In the interview I said it was my observation that the company hired managers for subject matter expertise, and put them in charge of people, with neither skills, training nor support. So “management” functions were tacked onto their day jobs. As for the quarterly check-ins—if managers don’t have that as a metric for their performance evaluations, you’re totally dependent on the commitment of your manager to giving you feedback.

Blank stare.

By the time I got to Q23 (which, interestingly, was not required) I just limited myself to the font of all evil across the organization. They have no strategy; everything is tactical. Which is one of the many reasons my extremely measured response to Q24 is basically a prediction of failure: incompetence plus ignorance is not a recipe for viability.

As for Qs 25 and 26, without any kind of context, my response is useless: I might recommend the place to someone I don’t like.

The survey ended with the usual demographics, which I ignored.

Both the survey and the interview will have been a waste of time. I know for a fact that previous departing employees have given very candid responses to their reasons for leaving, and the information they supplied has gone into some vast Room 101 of HR faffing about.