How To Handle Your Retirement Exit Interview

Letting the cat out of the bag that you are retiring starts a lot of things rolling. There’s the stuff that we have to take care of and then there are the things our employer has to do. For some employers, especially those with a Human Resources (HR) department, that means picking our brain in a retirement exit interview. There are a lot of things you need to consider, and during your time of joy and retirement celebration it’s easy to be caught off guard. Understanding HR’s need to know vs. your future interest should be carefully thought out.  

How To Handle A Retirement Exit Interview

Image source

The Retirement Exit Interview – What’s It All About Anyway?

There are all kinds of flavors and levels of detail that retirement exit interviews can come in. They usually come across as benign efforts to improve the company from an employee’s point of view or gauge whether they are hitting the marks they hoped to hit. Some might just be that, but often there are hidden agendas that are also being deployed. Agendas that aren’t going to do any good for you or anyone you like and leaving behind on the job.

Generally the things they want to know revolve around your reason for retiring, whether you felt you received the proper support and resources to do your job, and if you have any ideas that would make your job or workplace better. They can also question your opinion about the company’s leadership and direction; and your thoughts about your manager, work team, company culture, work-life balance, training, pay, benefits, etc.

There’s nothing wrong with these kinds of questions. But you want to go into this with a straight head and look at it strategically.

Resist Your Initial Emotional Reactions

Depending on your work experience you will have an emotional reaction ranging from –

To –

  • You’re honored that they want to know your opinion.

I certainly had feelings from both of these extremes when I retired. Instead of blindly letting emotion dictate how to handle your retirement exit interview, first ask yourself some questions to ensure you are not saying something that you will later regret.

Was employee opinion surveys part of the company’s operation?

If not –

If they never cared before about how anyone felt while a dedicated employee, why would they care when I’m retiring?

When employee surveys were a normal policy –

How did the company respond to employee concerns, suggestions, and/or positive results?

Did they make positive changes to correct employee concerns or deploy what my and many other companies do, the beatings will continue until morale improves?

Did they only report all the positive employee survey results but ignored bad ones?

Decide The Retirement Message You Want To Leave

You may have had a great experience with your work and employer. In that case you will most likely not run into any problems honestly answering retirement exit interview questions. But for most workers their employer and workplace relationship was more complicated. That’s when you want to be more guarded.

Goodwill vs Burning Bridges

In the end, the only thing we might want or need from the company we are retiring from is whether we are classified as rehirable. In my case I knew I wanted to live a retire early and often lifestyle. At least for the first years of my early retirement. I had valuable skills I built over a lifetime of education and employment. But I also wanted to protect my rights from any behind the scenes negative agendas.

You still need to be careful even if you don’t intend to ever work in retirement. Burning bridges by unloading all of your grievances will do more harm than the momentary euphoria of letting then have it. They will have the power to spin your answers any way they want. You won’t be there to defend yourself. You don’t want any corporate retribution putting a stain on your years of work. Even though your retirement exit interview results should be confidential, it could be in your file for many years. Details could get out for one reason or another and you will not be the one who looks good.

You have to ask yourself, what’s the point?

It’s better to hedge your answers to your advantage. Why say anything that can get out and tarnish your reputation, work legacy, or even your social life. Many people we work with may cross our paths throughout life.

What Else Could Go Wrong?

We have to consider why they might really care about our retirement exit interview answers. Especially if there has ever been company shenanigans that we endured during our employment. We have to remember the only reason HR is there in the first place. It exists to protect the company, not you. They want to gauge whether we have any intention to sue or file a complaint at a later time. Both glowing answers and ones of contempt can be used against us and spun in the company’s favor should a future legal issue arise. Sadly, even if that isn’t anything on our radar, we could be part of an ex-co worker’s complaint against the company and we should consider the possible long-term implications. The biggest thing to remember is this – there is really nothing in a retirement exit interview for you to justify going out on a limb either glowingly or damning.

Try To Avoid A Retirement Exit Interview All Together

Unless there is something specific in your employment contract, which is highly unlikely, submitting to a retirement exit interview is not mandatory. Minus that, it’s should be fine to politely decline. Just keep things professional but also overly kind.

Thanks, I appreciate your wanting to talk with me but I hope you can understand that I am busy focusing now on the future.

Thanks but I can’t make time. I’m very busy with transitioning my work to team members, saying my goodbyes, and I still need to pack up my workplace.

Thank you for asking but I have shared everything I can with the organization over my years here and have nothing more of value to offer.  

If for whatever reason you aren’t comfortable openly declining, then you can still stealthily move things in that direction. Simply delay it as long as possible. The company usually wants to do it just before leaving anyway. Set the time as late as possible and just slip out. What are they going to do, fire you?

When All Else Fails – Play It Cool

If you feel you better do the retirement exit interview then keep your answers as neutral as you can when answering questions about the company and your experience. When it’s in a written form with a sliding scale of 1 to 5, just rate things right down the middle. If it is a face to face interview try to answer as vaguely as you can. Use escape phrases when pinned-down like, I never gave that much thought before so I can’t really answer that. When you can, push to talk about the future and focus positively on yourself. Be brief and don’t ramble on about things. Elaboration isn’t something that favors us in a retirement exit interview. It’s OK to use awkward long moments of silence to try to end the interview quicker.

When I was asked why I was retiring I told them I had planned for my early retirement many years ago and successfully reached this point where I could retire. I also directed the conversation when I could to talk about my being excited to see what happens next in my life. Everything I told them was true.

I certainly had my issues with my experience and the company was fully aware of how they treated things and people over the years, both good and bad. I was happily leaving on my terms and them knowing that fact was enough for me.