How To Create the Ultimate Exit Survey (Plus Questions & Free Template)

An exit survey can provide you with valuable insight into how employees truly feel at work in your organization. With the cost of losing an employee often between 1.5-2.0 times an employee’s annual salary, understanding why people leave your company and taking action to prevent this is crucial when it comes to meeting organizational goals and protecting your employer brand. 

In this article, we’ll explore what an employee exit survey is, why it matters, how to create an effective exit survey, and provide you with an exit survey template that you can use in your organization today. We have also created a free-to-use exit survey template.

Contents
What is an exit survey?
Exit survey best practices
How to create an effective exit survey in 7 steps
30 Exit survey questions
Exit survey template

What is an exit survey? 

An exit survey is a type of employee survey that is given to departing employees to complete, either before or after they leave. It typically asks questions around themes like reasons for departure, job satisfaction, frustrations, work environment and culture, colleagues and managers, and compensation and benefits packages. 

Employees who are leaving a company are often more willing to be open and honest with their feedback than an employee who is remaining in the company. So, an exit survey can help employers collect valuable information when it comes to the strengths and weaknesses of the workplace and employee experience. 

What is the goal of an exit survey?

Exit surveys achieve a number of important goals, which is why all organizations should conduct them. Let’s explore some of the key goals below. 

1. Understand why the employee is leaving: An exit survey can help HR and managers better understand what causes employees to leave and then take steps to reduce turnover.
2. Get feedback on the employee experience: An exit survey gives departing employees a chance to give honest feedback on the employee experience, which could provide employers with valuable findings. 
3. Identify issues in the company: The information you collect in an exit interview can help to identify and uncover issues in all areas of the business, whether it’s processes, management, culture, or something else.
4. Help with succession planning: Another goal of an employee exit survey is to highlight skills gaps. With this knowledge, employers can work to bridge these gaps and improve succession planning. 
5. Enable knowledge retention: Exit surveys help to identify which employees have specialist knowledge, gather it, and plan for them to share this information before they leave so that it can be transferred to a colleague and is not lost when they depart.

Advantages of conducting exit surveys

Employers should conduct exit surveys as part of their offboarding process because this process has a number of benefits for the organization. 

• Identify areas of improvement: Once you’re aware of the key issues in your organization, you can identify areas that you want to improve and create a strategic plan of action to tackle each one. For example, if a recurring theme in feedback is the lack of learning and development at your organization, HR and business leaders can take steps to address this and improve L&D initiatives. 
• Boost retention: Exit surveys help you pinpoint the specific aspects of your workplace that push people to leave, giving you a valuable opportunity to improve and boost retention rates. For example, if the majority of employees tell you they’re leaving for better compensation and benefits with a competitor, it’s time to assess your offering and improve it in line with what your ideal candidates are looking for. 
• Gather insights on manager performance: Departing employees are more likely to be candid, providing information on their relationship and potential challenges with supervisors and managers. Over time, you may notice a theme emerging with specific individuals, which can then be addressed before the problem worsens and leads to more employees leaving. On the flip side, you may notice a positive recurring theme with other managers, which can then be recognized and rewarded. 
• Assess company culture: An employee exit survey can give you a true picture of your organization’s current culture from the employee’s perspective. This helps you see if where you’re at today matches the branding and messaging you promote to candidates and the wider public. Once you’re aware of issues in your culture, you can address them so that they don’t go unchecked. 
• Improving recruitment and onboarding processes: Asking departing employees about their experience during the onboarding process and whether the role and company matched their expectations is a great way to improve your recruitment and onboarding processes. For example, if the employee tells you that the role was not what they thought it would be, the job posting for this position should be reviewed to ensure it’s accurate.

Exit survey best practices

Here are some HR best practices for conducting effective exit surveys in your organization. 

• Explain the purpose of the survey: In your email to your departing employee, or at the start of the exit survey, it’s important to explain why you’re sending them the survey and how their feedback will be used to make improvements at the organization. Not only does this make you transparent, but If they know the purpose of the survey and that their feedback is going to be valuable to the company, they are more likely to complete it.
• Timing: There are different views when it comes to when the exit survey should be conducted. One view is that it should be carried out close to the employee’s last day, but before they leave to ensure that impressions are fresh and responses are not influenced by the employee working at their new organization. This can also give you a higher participation rate. 

HR tip

Conducting an exit survey after the employee departs can have a number of other benefits. The employee may be even more open and honest because they are no longer at the company, and the time away can help them accurately process why they left.

That being said, we recommend conducting exit surveys before the employee departs. 

• Anonymity and confidentiality: It’s important that your exit survey provides anonymity and confidentiality to the departing employee and that they are made aware that the information they share will not negatively impact them in any way; for example, it will not affect their job references. 
• Survey length: It’s important that your survey is long enough that you yield enough information but not too long that the respondent feels overwhelmed and doesn’t complete it. Generally, try to make sure that your exit survey takes no longer than 10 minutes to complete and focus on the most important areas for your organization. 
• Clear and relevant questions: Make sure the questions you ask are clear, to the point, and relevant to the employee’s experience and what you’re trying to accomplish. This is why different roles will often have different exit surveys. 
• Automate it: To reduce manual workload, we recommend automating your exit survey process. This can be done by using employee survey tools that enable HR to automatically initiate the exit survey in the final days before the employee departs. 
• Thank the employee: Don’t forget to acknowledge your employee for their contribution and commitment to the organization during their employment and to thank them for taking the time to share their valuable feedback. 

How to create an effective exit survey in 7 steps

Here are the key steps to effectively craft an exit survey that helps you improve your organization’s processes, operations, and employee experience. 

Step 1: Define the objectives

The first step is to clearly define what you want to accomplish from your exit survey. This may include understanding the employee’s reasons for leaving, the experience they had working in your organization, areas they think could be improved, and more. Each business will likely have specific areas of interest or areas they already know they need or want to improve and will tailor their exit survey to touch on this. 

Once you know your goals, you can then create an exit survey that helps you achieve these. 

Step 2: Keep it short

As mentioned above, keeping your exit survey short and to the point is crucial. Aim for 5-10 questions, and ensure it takes no longer than 10 minutes to complete. Lengthy employee exit surveys are less likely to yield a response. It’s better to gain a small amount of feedback on key areas than no feedback at all. 

Step 3: Select the right questions

Since it’s important to keep your exit survey short, asking the right questions is key. 

You want to learn why the employee is leaving, what could have made them stay, and gain insight into how they think the organization can be improved. Don’t be afraid to ask tough questions about the employee’s role, team and manager, aspects of work culture, why they joined the company and why they’re leaving, and their professional goals. 

It’s important to collect a mix of quantitative and qualitative data, where certain questions have a scale rating (e.g., 1-10), and others allow for comments. Make sure that your questions are refined to reduce bias. 

Step 4: Ensure anonymity and confidentiality

Using a third-party service to conduct your exit surveys is a great way to protect the confidentiality of your respondents and yield unbiased responses. However, it’s not unusual to give respondents the option to waive their confidentiality so that data can be made available to HR, managers, and business leaders if needed. 

Step 5: Use the right tools

Some HR departments use a simple Word document to create their exit interview surveys, but there are a number of other options. For example, SurveyMonkey is a popular free survey tool, Typeform is a modern interactive survey tool that allows you to customize any kind of questionnaire or survey and keep the aesthetics of your brand, and Checkster is an HR survey tool that can help to streamline and standardize your exit surveys and offers analytics on usage. 

Ideally, you want to be able to link an employee feedback form or platform to your HRIS so that a request to complete an exit survey is automatically sent once an employee hands in their notice. This saves your HR team time manually sending out surveys. 

Step 6: Analyze the data

Once you’ve built up a solid number of responses to your exit survey, you can start analyzing the data and looking for insights. There are a number of different platforms and software you can use to do this.

When analyzing your results, consider your company strengths and weaknesses. What are you doing well? What are key areas that need improving? What matters most to your people? Where can you take action that will help to increase retention going forward? Do the areas of concern match the feedback you’ve received through other channels, such as conversations with employees and other surveys? 

Don’t forget to celebrate what you’re doing well and take constructive criticism on board. 

Step 7: Take action

The final step is to act on your findings. Now that you know why people are leaving, this is your chance to make things better and reduce the chances of your top talent going to a competitor. From your data, you can see the areas of greatest concern, so aim to begin by focusing on improving an area that will create the greatest impact. 

Don’t be afraid to enlist the help of your existing employees to generate ideas for improvements and determine the action you will take. This will help to keep your best employees with you, as well as engaged and motivated.

30 Exit survey questions

Here are some examples of exit survey questions that you can ask your departing employees. We’ve classified these into different sections, which you may want to do in your survey. 

Exit survey template

Here, we’ve included an exit survey template example for you to look at. Let this inspire you to create your own exit survey that is tailored to your organization and the specific roles in question. 

Key takeaway

Along with an exit interview, an exit survey is a key part of offboarding. Not only does this help your departing employees feel valued and give them an outlet to openly vent their frustrations or concerns, but it also gives you valuable insight into what you’re doing well and where you can make the most improvement. 

With this knowledge, you can start to address problem areas and make your organization a happier and more supportive place to be for all employees, resulting in improved morale, engagement, productivity, and retention, all of which help to meet organizational goals.

Shani Jay

Shani Jay is an author & internationally published writer who has spent the past 5 years writing about HR. Shani has previously written for multiple publications, including HuffPost.

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