Retain top talent with exit insights

Create employee exit interview forms to understand why people leave so that you can go from high turnover to high tenure.

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No second-guessing

With expertise built in, there’s no need to stress over how to phrase survey questions.

Get candid feedback

Online forms provide a forum for employees to share things that they wouldn’t in a face-to-face setting.

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Powerful yet intuitive analytics help you spot insights by theme or team, fast.

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Draft your next exit interview survey in under a minute with AI-powered survey creation.
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Ensure a great experience for departing global employees with surveys in their native language.

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Create a safe place to share honest feedback

Upload information such as level, tenure, department and manager so that employees don’t need to provide them in the survey.
You can even keep responses completely anonymous.
Survey-sharing permissions keep your sensitive surveys secure.

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Discover ways to shape your employee programmes

Combine exit interview survey results with other employee data for richer insights into what drives employee turnover.
Tag open-ended responses and quantify your results according to topic.
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→ Multi-survey and longitudinal analysis

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Exit survey insights increase employee tenure five-fold for YES Communities

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“Improving retention is a marathon, not a sprint. Our SurveyMonkey results gave us data to develop a retention strategy and improve experiences. So far, we’ve seen average retention go from about 90 days to a year and a half.”

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Jean Gonzales | Vice President of Human Resources, YES Communities

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*Additional charges apply for extra responses. SurveyMonkey Audience panel responses are sold separately.

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Have any questions? If so, we’re here with the answers.

Which features should I look for in exit interview survey software?
Look for exit interview survey software that’s intuitive to use so you can get up and running quickly. It’s also important to consider analytics and reporting capabilities, such as syncing with other employee data, dashboards, thematic analysis and powerful filters to help you understand the differing experiences of specific groups of departing employees. Explore all SurveyMonkey plan features today.
What is the purpose of an exit interview survey?
An exit interview form or survey is used to understand the reasons why an employee is leaving your company. You can then use these insights to improve the employee experience. It is typically sent to the employee during their final working week or day.
Although employee exit interviews can be conducted in person, employees often feel more comfortable answering questions via an online survey or form. With this online method, you can use common questions that you would ask about topics such as pay, benefits and fair treatment as a starting point for creating closed-ended questions in order to quantify departing-employee sentiment. This means that you can track it over time to see whether you’re improving.
Which questions should be included in an exit interview survey?
Here are some top recommended questions from our employee exit survey template.
Questions about skill-role alignment:
- “How effectively did you feel your skills were put to use here?” Extremely, very, quite, not very, not at all
- “How helpful was your position here in stimulating your professional growth?” Extremely, very, quite, not very, not at all
- “How realistic were the expectations that were set for you?” Extremely, very, quite, not very, not at all
Questions about resources and benefits:
- “How well were you paid for the work that you did for this company?” Extremely well, very well, quite well, not very well, not at all well
- “How easy was it to obtain the resources that you needed to do your job well at this company? Extremely easy, very easy, quite easy, not very easy, not at all easy
Questions about treatment and recognition:
- “How often did you feel that your contributions were recognised?” Always, most of the time, about half the time, once in a while, never
- “Overall, how fairly were you treated?” Extremely fairly, very fairly, quite fairly, not very fairly, not at all fairly
- “How well did your supervisor treat you?” Extremely well, very well, somewhat well, not so well, not at all well.
Open-ended questions:
- What are your reasons for leaving this company?
- Which actions can your employer take to build a better workplace?
In addition to the questions above, it’s important to include demographic questions and departmental questions about factors such as age, gender identity, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, location, job level and tenure. This allows you to filter and compare these groups during analysis.
How do you analyse exit interview data?
Here are a few tips for analysing exit interview survey responses:
1. Use Top 2 Box scores to summarise closed-ended responses as a single number (for example, the percentage of departing employees who say that they had an excellent or very good working relationship with their manager). This makes it easy to compare topics side by side so that you can see where you should focus your attention.
2. Tag your open-ended responses so that you can spot the top themes at a glance. This turns open-ended text into a clean chart that quantifies how often themes are surfaced.
3. Filter responses according to aspects such as department or location to see whether there are any themes that stick out. You can then address them with the right level of management.
4. Track your results over time to see whether the changes that you’re making are having the desired effect. Along with the survey results themselves, you can track other key metrics, such as employee retention and turnover, to see the impact that your programmes are having on your business.

Resources to help you turn feedback into meaningful action

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