Changing jobs is natural; each rational company should know that its best employees can leave anytime. However, employees quitting often results from dissatisfaction with the workplace, morale, tasks, or management.

Exit Interview Survey Example

Thanks to implementing exit interviews at your organization, you will get valuable, constructive feedback about what your company should improve to avoid losing the best employees. Positive opinions will make you continue the excellent work of both the human resources department and the entire organization. Negative feedback collected in the survey is even more critical because departing employees will tell you exactly where to find problems affecting employees’ decisions about leaving the company.

But how to conduct an effective exit interview? We are here to help. Below we’ve described the essential topics connected with an employee exit interview and explained how sending the online exit survey to departing members of your team can improve the experience of current and future employees.

What are Exit Interviews?

We can explain an exit interview as a final conversation between the company’s representative (usually from the HR department) and the departing employee. The aim of an exit survey or personal exit interview is focused on gaining a sense and understanding of why your employee quit and what an organization can change to retain its best workers. That’s why an exit interview is a big part of employee offboarding.

Many HR employees will automatically associate the exit interview with a conversation conducted in person in the last days of employment. And they are right because it is currently the most popular form of conducting exit interviews. But there is an alternative that more and more HR departments choose – an exit interview survey.

By replacing a face-to-face conversation with an exit survey, HR employees can discover many benefits, including:

• receiving honest answers that most former employees would not give in a face-to-face meeting,
• collecting all the results from exit interviews in one place – without rewriting the answers, recording conversations, entering data into collective Excel, etc.,
• the certainty that all exiting employees who resign or were fired by the company will receive the same exit interview questions (so the human resources and managers would have access not only to particular completion but to the general overview of the company’s situation),
• the ability to quickly analyze the results of exit interview – in both collective (filtering, creating cross tables, rankings) and individual forms, in one place (on the Startquestion platform account).

Could Exit Interview Template be Helpful?

The hardest part of conducting an exit interview survey is to start; that’s why a ready-to-use exit survey template will help you with a good and quick kick-off. Remember that you can adjust our template of the exit interview survey to your own needs by:

• adding extra exit interview survey questions,
• erasing those questions which don’t fit your needs,
• changing the content of a particular question to be sure you will get honest feedback,
• adding advanced logic, for example, to display particular questions only to employees who quit or only to marketing department team members, to make the exit interview process as easy as you can,
• changing the questionnaire’s logo, colors, and font to make it more suitable to your brand image.

Although, remember that creating the exit survey is only the beginning. Thanks to advanced survey tools like Startquestion, you can collect each employee’s answer and analyze it in the same place, which will help you work more effectively on employee retention.

Exit Interview Survey Questions (Examples)

You must ask the right exit interview questions to get candid feedback from your former employees. We prepared a list of ready-to-use employee exit survey questions, which you can use directly in the survey, or treat as inspiration while creating your employee exit surveys.

Let’s start with the most general sample exit interview questions:

• Why did you decide to leave our company? (personal reasons, low salary, work environment, relations with coworkers, etc.)
• How would you rate your overall job satisfaction level?
• How likely would you recommend working in our company to your family or friends? (Employee Net Promoter Score question – eNPS).

Companies conduct exit interviews to find out why each former employee leaves the company and determine what they can improve to avoid losing the most valuable team members.

And some examples of more detailed exit interview questions

Exit interview questions presented below are connected to various areas of company culture, everyday work, and relationships between team members:

• How would you rate your relations with other employees and the direct manager?
• In your opinion, were the management practices good for your development in the company? Do you have any suggestions about how to improve management practices?
• How would you rate your work-life balance? What can the company do to help employees to obtain a healthy work-life balance?
• How would you rate the particular areas of working in our company: organization’s culture, company policies, team collaboration, work of human resources department, employee morale, exit process?
• Did you find a new job? What was the contributing factor while deciding on the new job? (salary, position, brand, company culture, team, manager, benefits package, office location, etc.)
• What are you expecting to change in your new job?

The best exit interview questions help you to understand why employees leave and what your company can do to keep the team’s best members on board. Collect feedback, analyze employee experience, read outgoing employees’ opinions, and improve morale by creating the best work environment possible.