Exit interviews: questions and approach

Why hold exit interviews?

People who are leaving have little left to lose and can often say more plainly what's wrong than colleagues who stay. That makes an exit interview one of the most candid sources of information you have, provided you go about it well.

The value rarely lies in a single conversation; it lies in the pattern. In the Harvard Business Review, Everett Spain and Boris Groysberg describe a financial services firm where one department shrank from 17 people to 8 within a year of a new manager arriving. The exit interviews pointed at that manager, but they also revealed something bigger: the firm promoted people for their technical skills, not their skills as managers. The executive committee changed its promotion process as a result. One interview wouldn't have shown that; the series did.

Interview, survey or both?

There are three common formats, each with strengths and weaknesses:

Whichever format you choose, three things always apply:

• Not their own manager. If the manager is part of the reason for leaving, you won't hear it in that conversation. Have HR, a colleague from another department or a third party do it.
• The right moment. People are easiest to reach between handing in their notice and their last day. Emotions can run high right before leaving; a week or two earlier often works better.
• Voluntary, and say so. Explain why you're asking, what you'll do with the answers and who will see them.

Exit interview questions

Use them as a guide, not a checklist. The best information usually comes from the follow-up to the first answer: can you give me an example?

The decision to leave

The work and the role

Manager and team

Growth and recognition

What to keep and what to change

How to run the conversation

Listen; don't defend. It's tempting to explain why something happened the way it did. Don't: your aim is to understand, not to be proved right.

Follow up on general answers. "Better opportunities" and "the culture" are a start. What kind of opportunities? Which moment? What happened then?

Record what was said, not what you think of it. Use the leaver's own words wherever you can. That's where you'll find the patterns later.

End well. Say thank you, explain what happens with the information and leave the door open. Former employees become ambassadors, or the opposite.

From individual interviews to patterns

One exit interview is a story. Twenty are data. To get more out of them:

• Use the same core questions every time, so you can compare across departments and years.
• Group the reasons into themes, such as manager, growth, workload, pay and commute, and count them per period.
• Look by department and by manager, but only where the numbers are large enough to keep individuals out of view.
• Put it next to your eNPS. A team with a falling eNPS and several leavers citing the same reason is a signal you can't ignore.
• Discuss it with senior leadership, not just within HR. Patterns are often about policy.

Privacy and confidentiality

An exit interview is about an identifiable person, and the answers are personal data under the GDPR. Agree who may read the notes and how long you keep them, and tell the leaver beforehand. Report to managers and leadership in summary form and across several leavers at once wherever possible.

Full anonymity is hard to achieve with exit interviews: in a smaller organisation only a few people leave each month, and everyone knows who they were. So don't promise anonymity you can't deliver, and be clear about what will stay confidential. What anonymity really takes is covered in our guide to anonymous employee surveys and the GDPR.