The Exit Interview
No One Conducts
On the conversations that happen in parking lots,
not conference rooms — and what they cost you.
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5 reads · 14 min total
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Recent Issues
The Retention Myth Nobody Wants to Disprove
What Your Offer Letter Says About Your Culture
Comp Bands Are Lying to Your Managers
What's Inside
This Issue
Five pieces. Every one edited until the unnecessary words gave up and left. Estimated reading time: 14 minutes total.
The Exit Interview No One Conducts
Most exit interviews happen after the decision is made. The conversation that would have mattered — the one that reveals the real reason someone is leaving — happens six weeks earlier, in a Slack DM to a friend at another company.
Read Full Piece →"We asked 200 People leaders to describe their last exit interview. Seventy-three percent said the departing employee was "polite and vague." Twelve percent said the employee cried. Only four percent said they heard something they hadn't already suspected. The problem isn't that employees lie in exit interviews. The problem is that we've designed a ritual that rewards lying — and then we call it data."
Data point
67%
of employees who leave within 18 months of joining say their manager never asked them a direct question about their experience.
Why Your Comp Bands Are Lying to Your Managers
You spent three months building a compensation framework. Your managers are ignoring it. Not because they're bad managers — because the bands tell a story about fairness that the actual offer history contradicts on every third hire.
Read Full Piece →"The band exists. The band is correct. The band is also irrelevant to the conversation your hiring manager is having with a candidate right now, because the candidate has an offer from a company that doesn't use bands — they use judgment, and their judgment is $40k higher than your band's midpoint."
Related issue
Ch. 31
"When Transparency Backfires: The Comp Conversation Your Team Wasn't Ready For."
You're halfway through the issue
Three more pieces like these, every Tuesday.
The Quiet Reorganization Nobody Announced
Some of the most consequential structural changes in a company never appear on an org chart. They happen in how meeting invites get sent, who gets CC'd on what, and whose Slack messages get replied to first.
Read Full Piece →"Power moves before titles do. By the time the org chart reflects reality, the culture has already adapted to it — and so has every person who was paying attention. The ones who weren't are the ones who will be surprised by the next reorg."
Contributor
Marta Villanueva
Former VP People at a 400-person fintech, now advising Series B companies on org design during hypergrowth.
Writing Your First Parental Leave Policy at Midnight
It's 11:47 PM. Someone just announced their pregnancy and HR is realizing the company's parental leave policy is two sentences in a Google Doc last edited in 2021. Here's what the policy actually needs to say — and what it's really communicating.
Read Full Piece →"The policy is never just the policy. It's a document that tells every woman in your company whether she should have a child while working here. It tells every man whether he's expected to take leave or just announce it. It tells your candidates something your recruiter will never say out loud."
Data point
3.2×
Companies with gender-neutral parental leave policies see 3.2× higher retention among employees who become parents in their first three years.
Translating Culture Into Numbers for Your Next Board Deck
Your board wants to see culture metrics. You have a Glassdoor score and a vibes-based hunch. Here's the framework that converts qualitative signals into the three numbers that actually move board conversations.
Read Full Piece →"The board doesn't distrust your culture. They distrust your confidence about your culture. The difference between "our culture is strong" and "our 90-day regret rate dropped from 22% to 9% after we changed our onboarding structure" is not a vocabulary problem — it's a measurement problem."
Data point
22 → 9%
90-day regret rate reduction achieved by a 180-person B2B SaaS after restructuring their onboarding from a 2-day orientation to a 30-day guided integration.
What readers say
“The only newsletter I read before I open Slack on Tuesdays.”
— Priya Nambiar, VP People · Carta (Series D)
Every word in Dispatch was edited
before it reached you.
Dispatch started because every HR newsletter felt like it was written by a vendor trying to sell you something, or a consultant trying to sound smart. Neither is useful when you're at 200 people and writing your first parental leave policy at midnight.
We read everything — the academic papers, the Reddit threads in r/humanresources, the blog posts from founders who got their culture wrong and want to tell you about it. We keep five things. We cut the rest. We edit until every sentence earns its place.
The result is a Tuesday morning read that takes 14 minutes and leaves you with something you can use before lunch.
Daniel Osei
Editor · Dispatch
Former Head of People · Lattice · 6 years building people functions
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Five reads,
every Tuesday.
No filler.
- Hiring strategy that works at 50 people, not just 5,000
- Retention signals before they become resignation letters
- Comp frameworks that survive your next funding round
- Board-ready culture metrics, not vibes-based reporting
- Policy templates written like adults, not legal disclaimers
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VP People · Carta
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Soo-Jin Park
HR Generalist · 220-person SaaS