Employee Refused to Give a Temp Agency an Exit Interview After They Withheld Insurance and Botched Her Paychecks for Months

Photo credit: AI-generated image created using ChatGPT. Illustrative only.

After months of paycheck headaches and basic benefits being out of reach, a worker thought the hardest part would be leaving. Instead, the most stressful moment came after she resigned—when the temp agency that had been cutting her checks told her she was “required” to sit for an exit interview and hand over details about her next job.

In the original post, she describes taking a role she believed would connect to her master’s degree, only to find herself doing office grunt work through a staffing agency. When a new opportunity finally came along—one she says she “REALLY wanted,” and that included insurance—she sent in her resignation letter and expected to move on quietly. The agency didn’t let it end there.

The job wasn’t what she was sold, and the pay kept getting messy

She says the work itself was disappointing from the start: not the degree-relevant role she had pictured, but routine tasks that didn’t feel like a match. Still, she stuck it out, likely because bills don’t wait and career plans don’t always land on schedule.

What made it harder was the agency’s handling of money and benefits. She says they didn’t offer insurance, which mattered enough that she highlighted it as a big win when she landed her next job. And on the paycheck side, she describes a pattern of problems: checks showing up late, and at times the agency allegedly taking more of a cut than her contract spelled out.

Fixing those mistakes wasn’t quick, either. She says it led to “lengthy phone tags and trips to the bank,” turning what should have been straightforward payroll into repeated, time-consuming damage control.

Fingerprinting turned into another fight over who pays

Then there was the fingerprinting requirement for the assignment—something she says was needed for the job. According to her account, the agency initially stated it would cover the cost, which is a pretty normal expectation when a placement depends on a specific clearance step.

But she says they ultimately didn’t pay for it, citing “confusion over contracts.” That left her dealing with yet another administrative burden tied to the agency’s management, and it added to the feeling that commitments were being made and then walked back when it was time to follow through.

By the time she started looking for a way out, she wasn’t describing one isolated mix-up. It sounded like a company that couldn’t keep basic employment logistics straight—pay, deductions, and even promised onboarding costs.

A better offer came through, and she tried to resign cleanly

The turning point was getting offered a job she actually wanted, one that came with insurance. She signed the offer, wrote her resignation letter, and sent it to her workplace. She also sent the same resignation to the temp agency, which was still her formal employer.

Up to that point, her approach reads like someone trying to do the responsible thing: give notice, put it in writing, and close the door without a scene. But the agency’s response changed the tone fast.

She says they emailed back that she was “required to provide an exit interview and information on where I was working next.” To her, that demand didn’t just feel unusual—it felt made up. She says she had never heard of a staffing agency insisting on that, and she checked her contract and didn’t find anything stating she had to comply.

The agency pushed for an interview, and the call got tense

Rather than just ignore the email, she called and spoke to the manager. She told the manager she wouldn’t be coming in for an interview and wished them luck. In other words: a no, but not a scorched-earth one.

She says the manager responded by pressuring her, asking why she couldn’t “just come in,” and generally pushing the idea that she had to do it. That’s where her frustration finally came out. She told the manager it was nowhere in the contract, that she wasn’t commuting an hour for it, and that she had “absolutely nothing nice to say about you guys.” Then she ended the call.

After that, she ignored further calls. And while she felt good initially—relief, maybe, or the satisfaction of refusing to be pushed around—anxiety kicked in soon after. She worried about professionalism and whether there could be backlash, even if she couldn’t name exactly what that would look like.

People zeroed in on the contract, the leverage, and the paper trail

The judgment included in the pasted material is clear: “Not the A-hole.” The focus wasn’t on whether she should have been nicer. It was on whether the agency had any real authority to demand an extra meeting and private details about her next employer.

Her point about the contract mattered most. If an exit interview requirement wasn’t in writing, commenters tended to see the agency’s insistence as posturing—an attempt to keep control at the moment they were losing it. And the demand for “information on where I was working next” read to people like a fishing expedition, not a normal offboarding step.

Just as important: the agency’s history in her story undercut their credibility. Late checks, incorrect deductions, and back-and-forth over fingerprinting costs made it hard to believe this was suddenly a workplace that needed strict procedure followed to the letter.

Walking away felt right, but she still worried about consequences

The unresolved tension in her story isn’t whether she quit. She already did, and she already landed something better. It’s the mental whiplash of leaving a frustrating job but still feeling pulled into one more round of conflict.

Even when someone is confident they’re correct—especially when they’ve checked the paperwork—workplace pressure has a way of lingering. A manager saying “required” can trigger that fear of retaliation: withheld pay, a bad reference, some unknown penalty. That fear is amplified when the last few months have already been filled with payroll mistakes and “confusion.”

In the end, she chose the cleanest boundary she had left: no extra commute, no interview, no details about her next employer, and no more time spent negotiating basic decency. She resigned, said her piece, and stopped picking up the phone.