Exit Interview and Onboarding Survey Questions

Two moments in an employee's life tell you more than any annual engagement survey ever will: the day they join, and the day they leave. A new hire's first impressions reveal whether your hiring pitch matched reality. A departing employee's honest answers reveal why people actually quit, not the polite reason on the resignation letter. Most companies skip both, or run them so badly that nobody learns anything useful.

This is a bank of exit interview and onboarding survey questions for both moments. The first half covers exit interview questions, built to surface the real reason someone is leaving without turning the conversation defensive. The second half covers onboarding survey questions, split across the first week, and the 30/60/90-day check-ins that catch a new hire drifting toward the door before they actually walk out of it.

Why exit interviews and onboarding surveys belong in the same playbook

They sit at opposite ends of the same relationship, and they answer the same underlying question from two directions: what made someone stay, and what made someone leave. An exit interview answer like "I never felt like I understood what success looked like in this role" is a finding a good onboarding survey would have caught in week one, months before it became a resignation. Run them together and you start closing that loop: the themes that show up repeatedly in exit interviews become the questions you add to the next round of onboarding check-ins.

Neither survey works as a one-off form filled in and filed away. An exit interview only earns trust if people believe something happens with the answers. An onboarding survey only catches a problem if someone actually reads the 30-day responses before day 45.

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Part 1: Exit interview questions

Setting it up so people actually tell the truth

Timing and format decide whether an exit interview gets honest answers or polished ones. Run it close to the last week, after the decision is final and there's nothing left to protect by staying quiet, but before the person has fully checked out. A short anonymous survey sent a day or two before the exit, followed by an optional conversation for anyone willing to talk further, tends to get more candid answers than a single mandatory meeting with a manager in the room. If the departing employee's own manager is the one asking the questions, expect softened answers; route it through HR or an independent form instead.

Reason for leaving

1. What's the single biggest reason you decided to leave?
2. Was there a specific moment or event that triggered your decision to look elsewhere?
3. How long had you been considering leaving before you started actively looking?
4. Did you raise this concern with anyone before deciding to leave? What happened?
5. Is there anything the company could have done differently that would have changed your decision?

Role and day-to-day work

6. Did the role match what you were told during hiring?
7. Were your responsibilities clear, or did they shift without explanation along the way?
8. Did you have the tools, access, and resources you needed to do your job well?
9. How manageable was your workload in your final few months here?
10. Was there a skill or interest you wanted to use more that this role didn't give you room for?

Manager and team

11. How would you describe your relationship with your direct manager?
12. Did you feel comfortable raising concerns with your manager? Why or why not?
13. Did you get feedback often enough to know how you were doing?
14. How would you describe the team you worked with day to day?
15. Was there a specific person or dynamic on the team that affected your decision to leave?

Growth, pay, and recognition

16. Did you see a realistic path to growth in this company?
17. Did you feel fairly compensated relative to your role and the market?
18. Did your contributions get recognized in a way that felt meaningful?
19. Were you given opportunities to develop new skills or take on more responsibility?

Culture and company direction

20. How would you describe the culture of your team compared to the company overall?
21. Did company decisions and direction feel transparent to you?
22. Was there a policy, process, or piece of bureaucracy that made your job harder than it needed to be?
23. Did you feel like your work actually mattered to the company's goals?

Wrap-up and referral signal

24. Would you consider working here again in the future? Why or why not?
25. Would you recommend this company to a friend or former colleague looking for a job? What would you tell them?
26. Is there anything else you want leadership to know that hasn't come up in this survey?

A practical note on length: 26 questions is the full bank, not what you send every time. Pick 10 to 15 that fit the role and situation, lead with the open "reason for leaving" questions, and keep the rest as a reference list you draw from rather than a fixed form everyone answers in full.

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Part 2: Onboarding survey questions

A single onboarding survey at the end of week one tells you almost nothing about whether a new hire is actually settling in. The signal is in the trend: how someone answers in week one versus day 30 versus day 90 tells you whether they're getting more confident in the role or quietly losing faith in the decision to join. That's why this section is three short check-ins, not one long form.

First week: orientation and first impressions

Send this between day 3 and day 7. The goal is catching a bad first impression, a missing laptop, an unclear reporting line, while it's still fixable.

1. Did you have everything you needed on day one (equipment, system access, a clear schedule)?
2. Was it clear who to go to with questions during your first few days?
3. How would you describe the welcome you received from your team?
4. Did your manager clearly explain what's expected of you in your first 30, 60, and 90 days?
5. Is there anything confusing or unclear about your role so far?
6. How does the actual job compare to what you expected based on the interview process?
7. Is there anything you wish had been communicated to you before your start date?

30-day check-in: finding footing

By 30 days, a new hire has enough context to notice real friction, but hasn't been there long enough to normalize problems as "just how things are here."

8. Do you feel like you understand what success looks like in your role?
9. Do you have the training and support you need to do your job well?
10. How connected do you feel to your team at this point?
11. Is there a process, tool, or piece of documentation that's been harder to figure out than it should be?
12. How comfortable are you raising a question or concern with your manager?
13. What's one thing that would make the next 30 days easier?

60-day check-in: settling in

14. Do you feel like you're contributing meaningfully to the team yet?
15. Has your workload felt manageable, too light, or too heavy?
16. Do you understand how your role connects to the team's and company's broader goals?
17. Have you received feedback that helped you improve?
18. Is there a skill or area where you'd like more support or training?

90-day check-in: the stay-or-go signal

By day 90, most new hires have formed a real opinion about whether this was the right move. This check-in doubles as an early retention signal.

19. Looking back at your first 90 days, how would you describe the overall experience?
20. Do you feel like this role matches what you were told during hiring and your first week?
21. How likely are you to still be working here a year from now, and what would change that?
22. Is there anything about the onboarding process you'd change for the next new hire?
23. What's working well that we should keep doing for future hires?

How to turn this into a real survey on SurveyKar

1. Start from the exit interview survey template for the departure side, or build a fresh form for onboarding using short text, single choice, and rating question types.
2. For exit interviews, turn on anonymous responses by default, and add a separate, clearly optional contact field for anyone who wants a direct follow-up conversation rather than a one-way form.
3. For onboarding, set up three separate surveys (or one survey sent three times) timed to week one, day 30, day 60, and day 90, so you get a trend across each new hire's first quarter instead of a single snapshot.
4. Use rating or Likert questions for anything you want to track as a number over time (workload, confidence in the role, connection to the team), and keep open-text questions to two or three per survey so people actually finish them.
5. Send by whatever channel your team already uses, email, a direct link, or WhatsApp for distributed or field teams, and set a reminder for whoever owns HR to actually read the responses before the next check-in is due.

Build both survey types through SurveyKar's survey and feedback tools, which cover the question types, anonymous response handling, and scheduled sends this setup needs.

Try it

For the onboarding side, start from the New Hire Onboarding Survey template. For ongoing check-ins with current staff, see our manager's guide to employee pulse surveys.

• Start from the exit interview survey template to get the question structure and anonymous settings already in place.
• Build your onboarding check-ins, first week, 30, 60, and 90 days, with SurveyKar's survey and feedback tools, using rating and short-text questions you can track across each new hire's first quarter.

Run both ends of the employee lifecycle on the same platform, and the exit interviews you collect this year become the questions you add to next year's onboarding surveys.