Exit Interview Questions Template

Everett Spain and Boris Groysberg's 2016 Harvard Business Review study of 210 organizations found three in four held exit interviews. Yet fewer than a third of executives with a program could name a specific action it had led to¹.

Never let the person's own manager run it. Gallup, which runs exit surveys for employers, says a direct manager should not conduct the interviews² if you want candid answers. Spain and Groysberg found interviews by second- or third-line managers most likely to lead to action¹. One step removed, a skip-level manager tends to hear franker answers and can follow up.

Most exit interviews happen in the final week, which the authors note is probably long after the person has disengaged¹. Some experts recommend the halfway point between notice and the last day. Book it when you start the offboarding checklist and allow about an hour.

A short survey a few months after they leave adds a second view. In a study by Joel Lefkowitz and Myron Katz, cited by Spain and Groysberg, 59% of former employees who answered one gave different reasons than in their exit interview¹.

Start broad, with why now, and let them answer in their own words, not from a list of reasons. Then ask about the manager directly. As one HR leader quoted by Spain and Groysberg put it, "Are they really going to tell you they're leaving because they don't like their boss? Probably not, because they want references¹."

Spain and Groysberg advise interviewers to refrain from discussing fixes for any problems that surface¹: ask what the person would change, without saying how the company might respond. They also suggest asking every leaver to finish the sentence "I don't know why the company doesn't just ____."

Code the departure while the wording is fresh. Use one fixed list of six reasons: compensation, manager or management, career growth, workload or burnout, culture or fit, and relocation or personal. Pick two, leaving the second blank only if there truly was one. A seventh reason, invented on the fly, splits every count that follows.

Two slots matter because leavers often have more than one reason. When Pew Research Center asked Americans who quit a job in 2021 why, 63% cited low pay, 63% no opportunities for advancement and 57% feeling disrespected at work³.

Record the manager they reported to when they gave notice, by name, and the team exactly as your HR system names it. If a reason is blank because nobody asked, leave that departure out of the rates rather than counting it as zero.

Each quarter, work out the share of departures that carry each reason, company-wide and for each manager. Report a manager's rates only once they have five departures in the past 12 months. Below five, one person moves the rate by 25 points or more.

Compare each manager with everyone else, leaving that manager's own departures out of the baseline. Otherwise the average contains the departures you are testing, and a real gap looks smaller.

Read the two rates together. A high manager share alone could mean a hard team. Regretted departures are people rated in the top two tiers before they left, counting only voluntary exits with a rating on file. A manager high on both is losing good people for a reason you can name.

Gallup recommends combining exit data with key performance indicators² and using it to coach managers with unusually high turnover. Spain and Groysberg open with a department where four people who resigned told the same story about their manager¹. The deeper cause was promoting managers for technical rather than managerial skill, so the company changed its promotion process.

Share rates, not quotes that point to one person. Findings about a manager go only to that manager's own manager and HR leadership, and never circulate as a ranking. Spain and Groysberg say any distribution plan should protect interviewees' candor, particularly about their bosses¹.

A reason spread evenly across every manager, such as pay, points to a company problem rather than a management one. Each quarter, record what you escalated last time and what came of it.

In a 2024 Gallup survey of 717 people who quit a job in the past year, 42% said their manager or organization could have done something to keep them⁵. Stay interviews ask current staff what might make them leave, while there is still time to act. To have River code your past interviews and compare managers, choose Edit with AI at the top of this page.