Once considered an uncomfortable part of office life, many businesses are reinventing the exit interview and capitalizing on its valuable information. The demand for outsourced exit interviews, in particular, has grown more than 70 percent because traditional in-house surveys tend to be incomplete and random. Outsourced exit interviews allow employees to be more honest and likely to participate. The outsourcing company provides businesses with comprehensive data, which is usually categorized by age, seniority, gender and other demographics.

Experts also recommend conducting engagement surveys (which are taken during an employee's tenure, not after) since those surveys can prevent people from leaving in the first place. Afterward, managers are provided suggested actions for retaining employees.

The article focuses on a nursing program in which exit interviews and engagement surveys both indicated the orientation program was not working for new hires. The same data also showed that money was not the primary reason for leaving. The unit made appropriate changes, and currently new nurses are surveyed at regular intervals, and several affiliates have started mentor and buddy programs.

Information from exit interviews is also used obtain information about employees that managers cannot discover on their own, such as drug use and sexual harassment. Additionally, boomeranging (persuading valuable employees to return) can be enabled with exit interviews. Questions for those employees should focus on discovering what it would take to make them stay with the company.