Exit interview survey: what to ask when someone resigns
The formal reason for a resignation (personal reasons, another opportunity, relocation) is almost never the full story. A well-structured exit survey, sent at the right time with the right questions, often reveals patterns around management, compensation, or culture that the resignation letter never mentions directly.
When to send it
The optimal window is after the resignation is final but before the last day — the person no longer has to protect a future relationship within the company, but the context is still fresh. Sending it weeks or months after someone has left drastically lowers both the response rate and the quality of the recollection.
The question categories that reveal the most
- The real reason for leaving (beyond what was said formally)
- Relationship with the direct manager: clarity, support, feedback received
- Compensation and benefits, compared to what they perceive the market offers
- Workload and work-life balance
- Growth opportunities they felt they had (or didn't have) in the role
- Would they recommend the company as a place to work to someone else?
Why an NPS-style question is worth including
"How likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work?" works the same as a customer NPS, applied to the employee experience instead. It's a single question that's comparable over time across different exits, useful for seeing whether the eNPS of departing employees is trending up or down overall, beyond any individual reason.
Anonymity changes how honest the answers are
Someone who's already left has less to lose by being honest than someone still working there, but it still helps to make explicit that answers aren't shared with the direct manager in an identifiable way, especially when the real reason has to do with that exact person.
How to structure it in SurvIQ
A mix of single-choice or rating questions (quick to answer) with one or two open-ended questions at the end to capture detail that doesn't fit a predefined scale is the format that best balances completion rate with the quality of the information. SurvIQ's builder lets you mix both types in the same survey with no restrictions.
What to do with the results
A single exit survey says little; the pattern across several exits says a lot. Reviewing the aggregated answers every quarter (not case by case) is what lets you spot, for example, whether most exits from the same team mention the same issue — a signal no individual resignation shows on its own.