Are you curious why your employees are quitting?
An exit survey is an important tool for identifying the reasons why an employee quit your company.
But if you’re not sure what questions you should be asking, I’ve put together a list of questions that can help you uncover important insights from an exit survey.
Must-Ask Exit Survey Questions
When designing your exit survey, I strongly recommend keeping it short enough that it takes no longer than 15-30 minutes for a person to fill out.
You don’t have to use every question in the list below. Instead, I suggest picking only the survey questions that make the most sense for your organization.
1. Why are you quitting this job?
This is an obvious one that you’ll want to ask right away.
There are a few ways you could present this question in your survey form.
For instance, you could use a Dropdown field with common reasons for quitting listed, along with a Paragraph field for allowing the leaving individual to provide details.
Or you could only use the Paragraph field to capture details about the person’s reasons for quitting.
2. What made you look into a new job?
Figuring out a specific time or event that caused someone to leave can help you pinpoint where and by whom changes need to be made.
Once again, you could use a Dropdown field with a few selection options for this question. Some common preset options for this question are:
- Pay lower than expectations
- Dissatisfied with growth prospects
- Unhappy with work-life balance
- Other
You could then couple the Dropdown field with a Paragraph field that appears after the respondent has selected an option from the Dropdown. In WPForms, this can be easily accomplished using conditional logic.
3. What could have been done for you to remain employed here?
Not only do people love being asked this, but you can get some more great specifics on incidents or other employees that may have caused someone to want to quit.
4. Did you share your concerns with anyone at the company prior to leaving?
Perhaps someone already knew there were issues and didn’t report them to you. This is a good question that uncovers if you’ve got communication issues in your business.
5. What would you have changed about your job?
This could provide some great answers to help you decide what you might need to change in the role for the next person coming into that position.
6. Did you have clear goals?
You can figure out pretty quickly if you need to make organizational changes if employees say they didn’t have clear objectives.
7. Were you given enough training for your job?
You can uncover if you need a better training process (or if it’s already sufficiently good) by asking this question.
8. What extra responsibilities would you have taken on?
Another helpful exit survey question to ask if you’re looking for ways to improve the role that was just vacated.
9. Does the company stick to its values and mission?
If you really value your mission and the ideals you created when you started your small business, it might be painful to see employees don’t think you have stuck to these.
But it can also be a positive eye-opener to discover where you need to make changes.
10. How would you describe the company’s culture?
Culture is a subjective term and means something different to everyone, but asking employees directly what they think about yours can give you deep insights into how other employees feel about your business.
11. Do you believe that upper management communicates well?
Communication is often a big complaint when people are quitting their jobs. You should always ask about this on your exit survey.
12. Do you enjoy the way we conduct employee reviews?
You may want to dig into how the employee perceives your processes for appraisals, reviews, and promotions (however your business conducts them).
13. What did you enjoy the most about this job?
It’s important to ask what people liked about their job just as much as you ask about challenges. This way, you can keep doing what you’re doing right while also working on improvements.
14. What did you enjoy the least about this job?
This is a given and if you see a specific answer pop up a lot in this spot, you’ll know exactly what needs your immediate attention.
15. Are there any specific issues you’d like us to know about?
Specifics are the name of the game in exit surveys. Ask for them a lot, and often.
16. What would need to change for you to consider returning to this job?
Here’s a solid question to ask on the exit survey to get concrete examples of changes you can make for the role. And, a possible chance to get insight into what you can do to win this employee back if you’d like to pursue that.
17. Did you ever feel bullied or harassed in any way?
This is an important question to ask on an exit survey to make 100% sure your employees never feel in danger at work and that the culture isn’t even a little bit toxic.
18. What new company will you be joining?
If they’d like to share, you can find out where people who are leaving your company are going in your exit survey by asking this one.
19. How can we make your transition smoother?
This is a kind gesture and shows you care about the person and not just the data on what can be done better.
20. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Add an open-ended question at the end to give people space to include any details they might think are important.
Get Started With Your Exit Survey
It’s super easy to whip up an effective and professional exit interview survey using WPForms.
Our exit survey template is highly dynamic because many fields in it will only appear depending on how a person answers preceding questions.
This ensures the person only sees questions that are relevant to them.
Get the Exit Interview Survey Template
However, you’re free to edit this survey form template any way you see fit using our drag-and-drop editor. You can edit any existing questions and their options, add new ones, or remove the fields you don’t want.
Plus, if you enable survey reporting, you can analyze all your results with easy-to-read charts on your WordPress backend.
Not only do you get amazing surveys like this one, but WPForms Pro comes with some other really effective small business tools for your website’s forms like:
- Tons of Templates — Easily set up tons of forms including job application forms to find new employees.
- Email Marketing Integrations — Set up your exit survey to automatically send data to your email lists in Constant Contact, Brevo (formerly Sendinblue), Mailchimp, and more.
- Conversational Forms — Use highly engaging Conversational Forms to impress people with interactive marketing.
- Landing Pages — Get more people to finish your forms by creating distraction-free form pages.
- Secure Forms — Protect forms with different anti-spam options like custom captcha, hCaptcha, Google reCAPTCHA, Akismet, Turnstile, and a lot more
- …and so much more
Exit Interview Questions – FAQs
For some added context on exit interview survey questions, you may find it helpful to read some of the commonly asked questions on the topic:
What is the purpose of an exit survey?
Employee retention is super important when running a small business. You want your time and resources to be focused on growing your income, not just on hiring new employees to fill gaps from previous ones quitting.
So the purpose of an exit survey is to see what you can do better as a business owner. Conducting an exit interview is a great way to find out more about an exiting employee’s decision to leave.
If you have a Human Resource (HR) department, they’ll be especially interested in how to improve employee engagement by finding out potential issues.
That way, you can use those employee exit survey questions to try and keep others around longer.
What makes a good exit survey?
Here are a few exit survey best practices for creating a good exit survey:
- Keep It Brief – You may want to know everything about an employee’s experience with your business, but try and be respectful of their time and privacy and ask only for what you need. Make the form seem shorter with things like Conditional Logic and Multi-step Forms.
- Avoid Distractions – Add your exit survey to a distraction-free landing page to help encourage people complete it.
- Using Conversational Marketing – People get bored easily, so if you’re conducting your exit interview over the internet using an online survey form, it’s important to try to make it at least feel like a face-to-face conversation. Try Conversational Forms to help keep your conversion rate high.
- Track It – Along with other important Google Analytics metrics your business should track, you can also see how many people are visiting your survey page and finishing it, so you know if you need to change something.
We have an awesome example of an exit interview form template in our Form Templates gallery.
When should an exit interview be done?
Exit survey questions are best sent when the job is still fresh on an employee’s mind.
You should conduct the interview during the last few days of someone’s employment, or within a week of their official departure.
That way, you can get an honest and detailed response to your questions. If the exit survey email doesn’t get sent soon enough, you risk the employee forgetting some important details that might help you make things better for employees in the future.
How often should organizations review and revise their exit survey questions?
It’s a good idea to review your exit survey regularly. You should be reviewing your exit survey questions at least once a year and also every time your organization is impacted by changes in structure or policies, shifts in work culture, and most importantly, when you have concrete feedback from employees about the quality and effectiveness of your existing exit survey form.
Next, Learn Survey Complaints to Avoid
And there you have it. We hope this list of must-ask exit survey questions helps you create a great questionnaire that lets you discover what you’re doing right for your employees as well as what you could improve on.
For some ideas on what not to do on your surveys, check out our guide to the top complaints customers have about online surveys.
So what are you waiting for? Get started with the best WordPress forms and survey builder today.
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