Exit Interview Questions: 55 to Ask, Including Knowledge

Good exit interview questions cover two things: why the person is leaving, and what they know that will leave with them. Ask 8 to 12 feedback questions about role, manager, growth and pay, then run a separate knowledge conversation about open work, unwritten workarounds, key contacts and the reasons behind past decisions.

Most exit interviews only do the first half. HR collects feedback, files it, and the person's real knowledge walks out on their last day. This guide gives you both halves: 55 questions you can copy, grouped by purpose, and a simple way to run them.

Why do exit interviews need two tracks?

The feedback track asks how the job felt. The knowledge track asks what the job knew. They need different people in the room and different timing.

The stakes are real. Gallup estimates that replacing an employee costs between one-half and two times their annual salary (Gallup). A 2018 YouGov survey commissioned by Panopto found that respondents considered 42% of their job knowledge unique to them (Panopto press release). Treat that second figure as a self-reported order of magnitude, not a precise measure, but it matches what most managers feel when someone resigns.

Feedback track: 25 exit interview questions to ask

Why are you leaving?

1. What made you start looking for a new role?
2. Was there a specific moment when you decided to leave?
3. What does your new role offer that this one did not?
4. Could anything have changed your decision? When would it have needed to happen?
5. Did you raise any of these concerns before? What happened?

The role and the work

1. How closely did the job match what you were told when you joined?
2. Which parts of your work felt most valuable? Which felt like waste?
3. Did you have the tools, information and authority to do the job well?
4. Was your workload sustainable? What made it heavier than it needed to be?
5. What would you change about this role before we hire for it again?

Manager and team

1. How would you describe your relationship with your manager?
2. Did you get useful feedback, and often enough?
3. Did you feel recognized for your work?
4. How well did your team work with other teams?
5. Is there anything about the team you would want leadership to know?

Growth and pay

1. Did you see a path to grow here? What blocked it?
2. Did you get the learning and development you expected?
3. How did you feel about your pay and benefits compared with the market?
4. Was pay the main reason you are leaving, one reason among several, or not a reason?

Culture and the organization

1. How would you describe the culture to a friend considering a job here?
2. Did you feel decisions were explained, or just announced?
3. Did you feel safe raising problems?
4. What should we keep doing exactly as it is?
5. Would you consider coming back in future?
6. Is there anything we did not ask that we should have?

Knowledge track: 30 questions about what the person knows

Run these with the manager or successor, ideally in two or three sessions of 30 to 45 minutes. Record the answers straight into a handover document.

Work in flight

1. What is the real status of each thing you own, beyond what the tracker says?
2. What have you promised someone, inside or outside the company, that is not written down?
3. What is due, expiring or up for renewal in the next six months that only you track?
4. If nothing changes after you leave, what breaks first, and when?
5. Which tasks happen only once a quarter or once a year, so nobody else remembers them?

How the work actually gets done

1. Walk me through your most frequent task from start to finish.
2. Where do you deviate from the documented process, and why?
3. Which shortcuts, scripts, spreadsheets or personal files does your work depend on?
4. Where are the files, logins (via the password manager, never in the doc) and dashboards your successor needs?
5. What do you check before you consider something finished?
6. What goes wrong regularly, and what is your standard fix?

Decisions and their reasons

1. Which decisions in your area would look strange to a newcomer but have good reasons behind them?
2. What did we try that failed, so nobody should try it again without knowing the history?
3. Which decisions are still open, and what would you recommend?
4. What would you change straight away if you were staying?
5. Which current arrangement is a temporary workaround that became permanent?

People and relationships

1. Who do you work with most, and on what?
2. Who actually approves things in practice, as opposed to on paper?
3. Which customer, supplier or partner has preferences you only learn by getting them wrong?
4. Which relationships need a personal introduction rather than an email?
5. Who should your successor meet in their first week?

Risks and judgment

1. What should your successor never change without asking first? Who should they ask?
2. Which incident taught you the most, and what is the lesson in one sentence?
3. What is the most common mistake a new person would make in this role?
4. Where are we exposed if you are not here, for example audits, compliance dates or single points of failure?
5. Which topics do only you understand well in this team?

For the successor

1. What should your successor focus on in their first two weeks?
2. What can safely wait?
3. Which documents or past threads are worth reading first?
4. If your successor could ask you one question in three months, what do you think it would be?

How to run the exit interview

1. Start the knowledge track the week notice is given. Book two or three sessions with the manager or successor.
2. Share the questions in advance. People give better answers when they have had time to think.
3. Write answers into the handover document during the session. Do not rely on notes to be written up later.
4. Run the feedback conversation in the final week, led by HR or someone outside the reporting line.
5. Close the loop. Report feedback themes to leadership every quarter, and check with the successor after 30 days whether anything was missing.

Common mistakes

• Only asking why they left. You learn about retention but lose the job's knowledge.
• Asking for a summary. "Can you write up everything you do?" produces a thin document. Specific questions produce useful answers.
• Leaving it to the last day. By then there is no time to follow up.
• Mixing feedback and handover. People will not criticize their manager in a document the team will read.

How Reattend helps

Reattend is organizational memory software. Its desktop app remembers decisions, commitments and meeting notes as work happens, so less depends on what someone can recall in their final week. Exit interviews can be answered question by question in the desktop app and turned into a handoff document, and leaders can see the topics only one person holds and their open commitments. Use the questions above with or without it. If you want a ready-made form, start with our exit interview template.