> They could tell you they’re fine to be a reference, but when someone calls they could say bad things. They could refuse to confirm your employment to a background investigator. They could call your new company and tell them you were fired for fraud.
These things are almost certainly illegal (IANAL) and could open up a firm employing such tactics to significant legal liability. In many larger companies, internal policies dictate that reference checks should only be answered with confirmation of employment dates and nothing else, due to the possibility of lawsuits.
The biggest risk of being honest in a way that reflects negatively on your employer in an exit interview is burning a bridge. This is a fairly minimal risk if the exit interview is with HR, though you maybe flagged as a potential trouble-maker or something.
I worked with a guy once who hated video calls. They made him nervous, and he felt strongly in async communication (inspired heavily by Basecamp's literature). The rest of the team/company was more open to video calls alongside written communication, and so he found a job elsewhere. In his exit interview, he brought this up as a problem, and so even though we didn't abandon synchronous calls, we had a bit more insight into the invariants in our team culture that would help us when hiring as well as when communicating internally.
These things are almost certainly illegal (IANAL) and could open up a firm employing such tactics to significant legal liability. In many larger companies, internal policies dictate that reference checks should only be answered with confirmation of employment dates and nothing else, due to the possibility of lawsuits.
The biggest risk of being honest in a way that reflects negatively on your employer in an exit interview is burning a bridge. This is a fairly minimal risk if the exit interview is with HR, though you maybe flagged as a potential trouble-maker or something.
I worked with a guy once who hated video calls. They made him nervous, and he felt strongly in async communication (inspired heavily by Basecamp's literature). The rest of the team/company was more open to video calls alongside written communication, and so he found a job elsewhere. In his exit interview, he brought this up as a problem, and so even though we didn't abandon synchronous calls, we had a bit more insight into the invariants in our team culture that would help us when hiring as well as when communicating internally.