Exit Interview Questions Template
Three documents and three sheets, including the cross-tab that shows whether a theme belongs to one manager or the whole company.
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Theme Frequency by Team and Manager, one row
Two numbers turn a theme into a finding
Both computed from departures already coded to a manager and a team. Neither depends on anyone's opinion of the manager.
Manager-Theme Share
Of everyone who reported to this manager and left in the trailing year, the share whose exit interview coded Manager or Management as a theme. Reported only once a manager has five or more trailing-year departures, so a small team never produces a number that looks like evidence.
Baseline Excluding This Manager
The same share recomputed across every other departure in the company, with this manager's own reports removed first. Comparing against the untouched company-wide average understates the gap, because that average already includes the very departures under review.
Regretted Attrition
Joined separately from the performance record: the share of this manager's departures rated in the top two tiers immediately before they left. High on both figures is what turns a coaching conversation into an escalation.
Flag
Escalate, or below the five-departure floor. There is no third state, and a rate on four people is never reported as a finding.
Exit interviews get filed one at a time: a write-up per departure, read once by whoever conducted it, then archived. Nothing forces a comparison between one departure and the next, so a theme clustering under a single manager reads, from inside any one file, like an unrelated personal complaint. This pack codes every departure to a team and a manager, then cross-tabs the themes quarterly so the pattern a company only sees in aggregate stops hiding inside individual stories.
The mechanism is two numbers computed for every manager with five or more trailing-year departures: their own theme share, and the company-wide baseline recalculated with their own reports removed first. In the worked example, one manager's eleven departures carried a Manager or Management theme at 72.7 percent, against a company-wide baseline of 26.2 percent that fell to 9.7 percent once that manager's own departures were excluded from it. That second figure, not the first, is what made the gap unambiguous rather than merely elevated.
Regretted attrition is joined from the performance record separately: the same manager's departures rated Exceeds or Strong at 54.5 percent, against a company-wide 31.0 percent. A high theme share alone could be a hard team; high regretted attrition alongside it is losing good people to something identifiable. Written for teams who already run 30-60-90 onboarding at the other end of the lifecycle. A leaver's handover is narrower than this, and whether they are worth reaching out to later is a separate call, recorded once in the alumni register.
What is in the pack
Interview Guide
The open questions first, with the manager-relationship questions asked directly rather than left to surface on their own, since most people will not volunteer a manager complaint unprompted.
Departure Register
One row per departure: team, manager at time of departure, two theme slots, last performance rating, and whether they would return. Every cross-tab in the pack traces back to this sheet.
Theme Frequency by Team and Manager
Every manager with five or more trailing-year departures, scored against a company-wide baseline recomputed with their own reports excluded, so the comparison is not diluted by the departures it is investigating.
Regretted Attrition
The share of each manager's departures rated in the top two performance tiers, reported alongside the theme share rather than as a separate figure, because the combination is the actual finding.
Quarterly Synthesis
Leads with the highest-gap manager-team pairing stated as a rate comparison, then the company-wide distribution, then what was escalated last quarter and what happened to it.
Escalation Note
For anything that cannot wait for the quarterly cycle: a threshold crossed mid-quarter, or a disclosure of harassment, discrimination or a safety concern that goes to employee relations the same day.
How it works
- 1
Send what exists
Past exit interview notes or recordings, whatever reason coding is already in use, and manager and team information for each departure. Performance ratings are optional and can follow later.
- 2
Code the same day
Two theme slots per departure from a fixed six-category taxonomy, tied to the manager and team at the time of departure, while the interview is still fresh rather than batched at quarter-end.
- 3
Cross-tab against a floor
Every manager with five or more trailing-year departures gets a theme share compared to the company baseline excluding their own reports. Fewer than five, and no individual number is reported.
- 4
Join performance, then escalate
Regretted attrition is joined from the performance record and read alongside the theme share. A manager elevated on both gets an escalation note the same week, not at quarter-end.
Frequently asked questions
Why not just download a list of exit interview questions?
Because a question list was never the hard problem. Every incumbent template covers the same six or seven categories. None of them cross-tab the answers by manager and team, and fewer than a third of executives can even name an action taken from exit interview data at all (SHRM).
What happens if a manager has only three or four departures?
Nothing gets reported at their level. Their departures still post to the register and count toward the company-wide baseline, but no manager-specific share is shown until they clear five trailing-year departures, because a rate on three or four people is not yet a rate.
We don't track performance ratings consistently. Is the pack still useful?
Yes. Theme frequency runs on the coded register alone and needs no performance data at all, so it is available from the first quarter. Regretted attrition is the second, optional layer, and it activates whenever a manager sends ratings for their own departures.
Why compare to a baseline that excludes the manager being reviewed?
Because the untouched company-wide average already contains the departures under review, which understates the gap for exactly the manager it should be most sensitive to. In the worked example the untouched baseline was 26.2 percent; recomputed without that manager's own eleven departures, it fell to 9.7 percent.
Why ask 'would you return' and 'would you refer someone' separately?
Because the gap between the two answers is informative on its own. Someone who would refer a friend but would not return themselves is usually describing a role problem specific to them, not a company-wide one, and conflating the two questions loses that distinction.
How does this fit with the rest of offboarding?
It runs alongside, not instead of. Access revocation and required paperwork are separate, deadline-driven processes; this pack is the only one built to learn something from why people left rather than just executing their exit.
What's in the download, and what does Edit with AI add?
Three Word documents and three CSV sheets in one zip, free and with no account needed. Edit with AI installs the pack as a private space and codes your own departures: your managers, your teams, your performance data, with the five-departure floor enforced automatically.
Find out if a theme belongs to one manager or the whole company
Send your exit interview notes with manager and team attached. The first thing back is every manager's theme share against a baseline that excludes their own departures.
Cross-tab my departures