our exit interviews are emailed to all managers, how to ask about AI use in a job interview, and more

It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…

1. Our exit interviews are emailed to all managers

I work for a small company with a one-person HR team. When a team member leaves the company by choice, the HR person conducts an exit interview. The transcription of the interview is then emailed to the entire management layer of the company — about a third of the company headcount — without any edits or redactions. Details of personal circumstances, raw feedback about supervisors or coworkers, all of it just out there in the open with names attached.

Many of us middle managers are horrified by this practice and object both on privacy grounds and because there is no clear indication that anything is being done to catalogue, analyze, or respond to the feedback provided in the exit interviews. What are the best practices around exit interviews, and how would you recommend middle management at my company press for something better?

Yeah, this is weird and a bad practice.

You don’t blast out raw exit interviews to a third of the company. I doubt the people who gave that feedback in their exit interviews would appreciate it being used that way — and if word gets out that that’s how they’re handled, exiting employees are going to start being way less candid.

Someone needs to be charged with assessing and synthesizing the info from exit interviews and identifying trends and areas for further evaluation or change; without that, there’s very little point to doing them at al.. Then, that should be shared with whoever has an actual need to know — generally HR and people in the management chain for whatever issues came up, not just “everyone gets to see all of it, all the time, regardless of relevance to them.” Often HR will share trends with the organization’s leadership quarterly, while addressing individual issues as they come up (such a manager needs more management training or a potential legal concern). But the best practice is to keep things as confidential as possible so that feedback can’t be connected with an individual person unless that’s unavoidable to get a problem addressed.

The way it’s being handled now is almost gossip-adjacent, rather than something being used constructively.

You and the other managers who are concerned should ask how the feedback is assessed and used beyond the email blasts you see, and then share the concerns above and propose more targeted use of the information. If you have some examples of sensitive issues that were shared far more widely than they needed to be, mention those and ask for the reasoning in doing that.

Here’s a decent article you could share on how employers can assess the data from exit interviews.

Related:
should I tell the truth in my exit interview?

2. How can I ask about AI use in a job interview?

I’ve started looking for another job for many reasons, but chief among them is my company’s increasing push for everyone to use AI (it’s gone from “this is a helpful tool to use as needed” to “we expect you to use this as much as possible” alarmingly fast). No judgment to those who use AI when needed but I personally try to limit my use as much as possible due to the environmental implications (and a small fear that I may one day be replaced with a robot).

What is the best way to ask a new company about how they’re using AI while you’re interviewing, both for the specific role and company- wide? In case it’s helpful context, I work in an admin/support role.

You can ask pretty directly: “I know AI is changing the way a lot of offices operate. Is it having an impact on the work of this role, and in the company more broadly?”

But the problem is exactly what you saw at the company you’re trying to leave: it can go from “this is a helpful tool to use as needed” to “we expect you to use this as much as possible” alarmingly fast. So the answer you get in an interview might not still be the case a couple of months from now.

You can still ask! You’d just want to be aware that that’s the case.

3. Do employers really distinguish between part-time and full-time work for years of experience?

Have you ever known employers to distinguish between part-time and full-time when checking experience requirements? I’ve never been asked this, but one of my part-time contracting gigs was disproportionately valuable in accruing apparent experience when life didn’t allow me to go full-time. So four years at 10 hours a month counts as four years of experience.

Rather than dropping out entirely to raise kids / go back to school / do a medical thing, why do more workers not just scale way back? (Or do they?)

Yes, some employers do distinguish between part-time and full-time work when they’re calculating how much experience you have, but it depends very much on the role, the type of experience, and how part-time you were — as well as whether they even know it was part-time because they might not.

I wouldn’t count 10 hours a month for four years as being the equivalent of four years of experience, but I’m also not deeply invested in calculating years of experience for most jobs; I’m more interested in your overall expertise. Years of experience can be a decent stand-in for that to some degree, but not the extent that I’d prioritize it over things like how deep your subject knowledge expertise is, the range of challenges you fielded / got exposed to during that time, and what you actually achieved in that time period. Someone could work 40 hours a week for 10 years and still not be better at the work than someone really talented who worked half-time for three years.

To the extent that employers are deeply focused on years of experience as an early-stage screening tool, you mainly see it with more junior-level jobs. A job that says they want two years of experience is communicating something about the general profile of candidate they’re seeking and that it’s not a new grad who interned for four hours a week for their last two years of college.

As to why more people don’t scale way back rather than dropping out of the workforce entirely when they have other things going on: one large reason is because there aren’t nearly as many part-time professional jobs available as people who would likely want them (particularly when you narrow it to their specific field).

Related:
how to calculate how much work experience you have

4. Does the Equal Pay Act apply if you’re both women?

My coworker recently referred her friend to a job opening on our team, and she was hired. As friends do, they compared their compensation numbers and found that the new hire was going to be paid more. They will have the same title and the same responsibilities. My coworker then went to her manager to address this discrepancy and was told that her compensation would not be brought up to match the new hire’s. I know this would be a legal issue if a man was being paid more for the same job, but since the issue is between two women, does the Equal Pay Act still apply? Does my coworker have any recourse to this obvious unfairness?

The Equal Pay Act only prohibits paying men and women differently for the same work; it does not apply if the differently paid employees are the same sex. That’s because the law’s goal isn’t salary parity in general; it’s specifically about sex discrimination.

So your coworker doesn’t have legal recourse, but she can still make the case for a raise based on her own performance and the new info she has now about the value of the work to the company. That said, she should also look at whether there might be legitimate reasons for her friend to be bought in at a higher salary, like a different or more advanced skill set, more experience, different education, stronger track record of achievement previously, etc.

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