Exit Interview Form Template

People tell the truth on their way out, as long as you ask before the goodwill fades and make the asking painless. An exit interview form beats the awkward final-week meeting on both counts: the departing employee writes at their own pace, without watching an HR face react, and the answers land in a structured table instead of someone's meeting notes.

What the questions pull out. Role and department make the data segmentable, since attrition insight is worthless as a company-wide average and sharp per team. The primary-reason dropdown forces one clear headline. People leave for bundles of reasons, and making them pick the biggest one is what turns twelve resignations into a pattern you can act on. The paired open questions are symmetric on purpose: asking only what went wrong produces grievance lists, while "what did we do well" preserves the strengths you must not optimize away by mistake. The workload scale catches the burnout signal that a face-to-face exit chat skips. The recommend-as-a-workplace score is your employee NPS from the people with the least reason to flatter, so track it over time and it becomes the least flattering culture metric you own. The return question builds your boomerang pipeline on the quiet: a "yes" from a strong leaver is a warm candidate in two years.

Names we don't collect. Manager-specific ratings by name and compensation-disclosure requests both stay off it. Named ratings turn a reflection into an accusation form and chill candor, and pay conversations belong in payroll's records, not in a survey a departing employee may not trust yet.

Who inherits a retention problem. HR leads who walked into one and need evidence before proposing fixes, agencies and restaurants with structural churn who want each departure to teach something, and small founders who cannot bear to run the meeting version but will read every answer.

Tune it to your culture. Send the link on the person's last morning, when candor peaks. If your culture skews cautious, make the name-adjacent fields optional and name in the intro who reads the answers, because specificity buys candor. Review responses each quarter with the CSV export: reasons, scores, and departments pivot into a one-page attrition story. Conditional logic can go deeper without bloating the default path, revealing a follow-up about management support only when the leave reason points at culture. Keep the ending gracious, since it is the last screen of their employment.

Patterns beat single voices. One exit is an anecdote, so treat it as one. Resist reorganizing a team over a single scathing response, because the signal lives in repetition; wait until a theme recurs across three or four departures before it earns a slide. The scores deserve the same discipline: a workload rating of 2 from one leaver is a data point, while a run of them from one department is a fire. Keep a running list of everyone who answered "yes" to returning someday, since that column is a sourcing channel most companies throw away.