Voluntary Resignation Exit Survey

Use this template when the employee is leaving by choice and you want to understand preventable turnover, not layoffs, retirements, or role eliminations. It is designed to isolate the reasons behind a resignation and the retention levers that might have changed the outcome. If the departure is involuntary, the questions about intent to stay and stay factors will not be meaningful.

Send it once, at the point of resignation or during the final days of employment, so the experience is still fresh. This is not a pulse survey and should not be repeated on a cadence. If you want trend data, compare responses across departures over time rather than re-surveying the same person.

HR or People Operations should own the survey, with access limited to the people who need it for retention analysis and action planning. Because anonymity is the default for employee surveys, avoid routing raw responses to the departing employee’s manager unless your process clearly protects confidentiality. If you need manager-level feedback, aggregate the results first.

Yes, anonymity is the default here because departing employees are more likely to be candid when they do not fear retaliation or awkward follow-up. If you choose to collect identity, do it only when there is a clear operational reason and a documented privacy policy. Keep any optional demographic questions out of the main flow and place them last if you include them at all.

The most decision-useful items are the primary reason for leaving, intent to stay, manager support, growth opportunities, workload sustainability, and the single change that could have changed the outcome. Those answers point to engagement drivers that leadership can actually act on. The recommendation question adds a useful external signal, but it should not replace the stay-factor questions.

Keep the core structure intact and tailor the answer options for your common departure reasons, such as compensation, career growth, manager relationship, workload, commute, or schedule flexibility. You can also add role-specific options for frontline, hybrid, or remote employees if those distinctions affect retention. Avoid adding too many questions, since exit surveys work best when they stay focused on the few items that change decisions.

Use a 5-point Likert scale with clear semantic anchors such as Strongly disagree to Strongly agree. That keeps the survey easy to answer and makes the results easier to compare across departures. Avoid raw numeric-only labels and avoid 11-point scales, which add friction without improving the decision value.

Attach an open-ended follow-up to any rating of 3 or below so you can learn why the employee felt that way. Then review themes by manager, team, function, and location to identify patterns rather than reacting to one-off comments. The goal is to turn exit feedback into action on manager effectiveness, workload, and growth gaps.

An ad hoc conversation can surface useful context, but it is hard to compare across employees and easy to miss the same recurring issues. This template standardizes the questions so you can see patterns in reasons for departure, intent to stay, and the specific changes that would have mattered. It also creates a cleaner record for retention analysis than memory-based notes from a conversation.