Nobody Asked
Words by Caitlin Allwood
In twenty-odd years of working in hospitality, across bars, restaurants, and hotels, I have never once been given an exit interview.
Not one.
I didn’t leave every job because I hated it. Sometimes I left for more money. Sometimes, for a better career progression. Sometimes, because something genuinely better came along, and it would have been daft not to take it. But sometimes I left because something was broken and nobody fixed it. And the thing is, nobody ever asked which one it was.
I think about this a lot now because I work in hospitality recruitment. The person on the other side of the table is almost always someone who has recently left a job or is about to. And what happens in that conversation is that they tell us the real reason they left. Not the one they gave their manager. Not the polite version they offered in their resignation letter. The actual reason.
And those two versions are almost never the same.
The manager hears “it’s just time for a change.” We hear “I raised a problem and nothing changed.”
The manager hears “better work-life balance.” We hear “I was done long before I handed my notice in. By the time I did, I didn’t care enough to explain why.”
The manager hears “I’ve been offered more money somewhere else.” We hear “I hadn’t had a pay review in two years. I wasn’t looking. But when someone offered me what I was worth, I couldn’t say no.”
The manager hears “I want to try something different.” We hear “I’d been in the same role for three years and nobody once asked me where I wanted to go next.”
This is not unusual. This is the pattern. Week after week, we sit across from good people who left good jobs because of something that, more often than not, was fixable. A conversation that never happened. A complaint that was brushed off. A manager who assumed everything was fine because nobody had complained loudly enough.
Sometimes the answer is straightforward. They needed a promotion, and there was nowhere to move. Fair enough. But more often than you’d think, someone has been unhappy for a long time, raised it, and nothing changed. Then, when they handed in their notice, it was accepted without question. No asking why. Just quietly letting someone walk. That one conversation might have made them stay. Or it might have kept the door open for a return. But if you don’t ask, it signals you aren’t bothered. And we’re telling you, it leaves people with a sour taste.
The exit interview is supposed to catch this. In theory, it’s the mechanism that closes the loop. The employee is leaving, the pressure is off, and there’s an opportunity for honesty that doesn’t exist at any other point in the relationship. It should be one of the most valuable conversations a business ever has.
But in hospitality, they barely happen. You might get a form. A tick-box exercise completed on someone’s last day, when they’ve already mentally left, are already thinking about what they’re wearing on Monday, and are already past caring whether anyone learns anything from their departure.
We have spoken to hundreds of hospitality professionals over the years, and we couldn’t think of a single candidate who’d had a proper exit interview with their employer, where someone senior sat down, asked what went wrong, listened to the answer, and meant it.
It’s worth asking why this is. Hospitality is not an industry that lacks people skills. We are in the business of looking after people, reading rooms, anticipating needs, and making someone feel welcome. We do this for guests every single day. But when it comes to our own people, when someone is walking out the door for the last time, we go quiet.
Part of it is time; service doesn’t stop because someone’s leaving. There’s always a section to cover, a shift to fill, a rota gap that needs plugging. The urgent always wins, and an exit interview never feels urgent. Except it can’t wait, because by definition, the person is leaving. Once they’re gone, the window is closed.
Part of it is an assumption. Managers think they already know why someone is going. They’ve got a story in their head. “He was never really committed.” “They just couldn’t hack the hours.” And once you’ve decided you know the answer, you don’t bother asking more. That’s the trap. Because the story in your head is almost always incomplete, biased even, and sometimes it’s completely wrong.
And part of it, if I’m being honest, is that some people simply don’t want to hear it. Asking someone why they’re leaving means being prepared for an answer you might not like. It might be about you. It might be about the culture you’ve built, or the problem you chose to ignore, or the conversation you avoided six months ago that would have changed everything. That takes a kind of courage that not everyone has. But leadership requires it.
The closest I’ve come to an exit interview has been more like offboarding. Someone going through a process, a handover, a knowledge transfer, ticking off the practical stuff. But never a human conversation. Never “Why are you really leaving? I want to hear about what we did well and where we can make improvements.” The logistics got handled. The person didn’t.
When you don’t ask, you’re not just losing information. You’re sending a message. You’re telling that person, whether you mean to or not, that their reasons don’t matter. That their experience of working for you isn’t worth understanding.
And you’re also guaranteeing that whatever went wrong will go wrong again. Because you’ve chosen not to know about it. The next person you hire into that role will hit the same problem, managed by the same person, in the same environment, and you’ll watch them leave in six months and say “people just don’t stay in hospitality” as though it’s a law of nature rather than a consequence of something you could have changed.
I hear that phrase a lot. “People just don’t want to stay.” And I understand why it feels that way. Turnover in this industry is brutal, and it’s been brutal for years. But sitting where we sit, hearing what we hear, week after week, I can tell you that most of the time the person who left didn’t want to leave. Not really. They wanted someone to notice something was wrong. They wanted someone to take their concern seriously. They wanted someone to ask.
Nobody did.
Here’s what I’d say to anyone reading this who manages people, runs a kitchen, or owns a business. The next time someone hands in their notice, especially someone good, someone you didn’t want to lose, don’t just accept it and start looking for their replacement. Sit down with them. Not on their last day when they’ve already checked out mentally. As soon as you can. Ask them what happened. Ask them what you could have done differently. And then actually listen to the answer, even if it’s uncomfortable. And it might be.
They might be going. But you’ll learn something that stops the next one from leaving for the same reason. And at the very least, you’ll part on terms that leave a door open rather than closing it forever.
Because in an industry where everyone knows everyone, and where reputation travels fast, the way you handle someone’s departure matters just as much as how you handled their arrival.
And if you’ve got someone good right now, someone you’d hate to lose, don’t wait for the exit interview. Have the conversation today. Ask them how they are. Ask them what’s working and what isn’t. You might be surprised by the answer.
