Leave Your Job On Good Terms And Save Yourself Regret
Author: Heather Eagar

The exit interview is not a time to burn bridges with your old
company. It has become a very common ritual throughout
corporate America, and the idea behind it is to find out from
departing staff members, when they no longer have to worry
about protecting jobs, exactly what things at the company can
be improved upon. The interview is deigned to be a tool for
making a company more efficient and a better place to work.
However, many employees who are leaving an organization use
this as a time to vent frustrations they may have felt. They
see it as a personal gripe session, and loose inhibitions,
sometimes venting personal ad homonym attacks against
co-workers, and especially against former supervisors and
bosses.

This is never a wise idea. Dale Carnegie and other personal
growth gurus have told business people for many years that it
is never good to burn bridges and offend someone when you could
just as easily avoid it. It comes down to the old saying, "you
can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." Keep that
saying in mind before the exit interview. Remember that if you
make personal attacks they will be seen as such by the people
who read the interview report. If you have genuine suggestions
for improvement, your case could be weakened by making personal
attacks. You don't really gain anything from attacking or bad
mouthing the people you used to work with or work for anyway,
and you may regret saying something in anger later on when you
are thinking more clearly.

Use the interview as a constructive tool, with good intentions.
The company you used to work for did, after all, provide you
with a way of making a living for the time you spent with them.
Granted, you provided services to them that they needed. And,
they paid you a salary or wages. Hopefully it was a fair
exchange. If you have honest concerns, then the interview can
be constructive. For example, one reporter for a local weekly
newspaper stressed that the computers being used were old and
out of date, and that the firewall software used was
ineffective. The system had suffered attacks of computer
viruses in the past, and it was obvious to the reporter that
the managing editor was not computer literate enough to
understand how to fix the problem. The reporter knew that the
publisher and the business manager would both read the exit
interview report, so she carefully and diplomatically worded
her comments, showing that buying new computers and new
software would save the newspaper money in the long run. By
wording it carefully during her exit interview she got her
ideas across to the appropriate people, and they took her
comments seriously because she had nothing to gain and nothing
to loose, and seemed to be reporting this situation for the
good of the newspaper and staff. In this manner the exit
interview benefited everyone involved.


About The Author: Heather Eagar provides reviews of the top
resume writing services that put you in charge of your career
so that you can get the job you deserve. sign-up for your free
Job Search Tips E-course. http://www.resumelines.com/