Exit Interviews: How to Run One and What to Ask

The person leaving the company is the only one who no longer needs to be careful about what they say. They will answer “why did you leave?” with an honesty no current employee can match. And yet this conversation usually ends as a generic paragraph in the HR system — “left for a better opportunity” — and dies there.

The numbers show the scale of the waste. In 2025, Brazil recorded 25.3 million formal terminations, according to Brazil’s official formal-employment registry (Novo Caged). That is more than 69,000 exit conversations per day, each one carrying a reason that, if heard in time, could have prevented the departure.

This post covers the essentials: what exit interviews are for, whether they are mandatory, when to run one, a ready-made question script, and — the part almost nobody does — how to record and accumulate the answers until they become data.

What an exit interview is for

The question an exit interview answers isn’t “did you like the company?”. It’s “what did we do wrong — and what would have made you stay?”.

The data suggests that question is pure gold. A Gallup analysis of employees who left voluntarily found that 52% say their manager or the company could have done something to keep them from leaving. And the most revealing part: only about a third of those people had a conversation with their manager about their dissatisfaction before resigning. In other words, the reason existed, the person knew it, and it never reached anyone who could act on it.

The exit interview exists to close exactly that gap — with the difference that, at the exit, there’s no longer any fear of retaliation. An employee who has already handed in their notice talks about salary, manager, workload, and culture with a frankness an internal engagement survey never gets.

There’s also a direct financial argument. SHRM estimates that replacing an employee costs 50% to 200% of the position’s annual salary, depending on the complexity of the role. Every departure the interview helps prevent avoids that cost — and the interviews that prevent nothing still deliver a map of the problems for the people who stay.

Is the exit interview mandatory?

No. No Brazilian law requires a company to conduct exit interviews, or an employee to take part — neither Brazil’s labor code (CLT) nor any other labor legislation mentions the practice. The exit interview is a good management practice, adopted by companies that want to learn from their own departures.

Two practical consequences of this rule:

1. The departing employee can refuse. Participation is voluntary, and refusal must carry no penalty — no delayed severance, no negative record, no retaliation. If participation is made conditional, the conversation becomes a source of legal liability instead of insight.
2. The company can also choose not to run them — but refusing to listen to the people on their way out is a strange choice for anyone who says they want to retain people.

Since trust is the critical ingredient, the best framing is to make it clear in the invitation: the conversation changes nothing in the exit process, the data is used in aggregate, and it’s perfectly fine to decline.

When to do it and who should conduct it

Timing: between the notice and the last day — ideally in the final week, when the decision is already made (the person no longer has the “will they accept my counteroffer?” game running in their head), but they’re still physically present, with the context fresh. Doing it on the last day, between handing back the laptop and the farewell coffee, yields rushed answers.

Length: 20 to 30 minutes is enough. A long exit interview turns into an unstructured venting session.

Who conducts it: not the direct manager. Departing employees rarely criticize with candor the person who will provide their future references. Ideally it’s someone from HR or a manager from another area — neutral, with no position on that team.

Format: video call or in person, with the same agenda for everyone. An anonymous form is better than nothing, but it trades nuance for multiple guesses — someone who picks “lack of recognition” from a dropdown won’t tell you the problem started when the 2024 promotion skipped over three people on the team.

What to ask: a ready-made script

The script must be the same in every interview — comparing answers to different questions is comparing nothing. A functional, tested script in eight questions:

1. What made you start looking for another job?
2. What could the company have done to make you stay?
3. What worked well in your day-to-day — what will you miss?
4. What got in the way of your work the most?
5. How was your relationship with your direct manager?
6. How would you describe the company’s communication to a friend on the outside?
7. What would you change about your role for the next person?
8. What would you say to someone considering working here?

Notice the pattern: none of the questions is “did you like it here?”. They all ask for facts and specific moments — “it started when…”, “the day that…”. A vague answer is a symptom of a bad question or of low trust; in both cases, the next step is to dig deeper with “can you give me an example?”.

The real problem: the answer dies in the memory of whoever heard it

Here’s the bottleneck that separates companies that use the interview from companies that merely hold it: the record.

The common scenario: the HR professional has the conversation, goes back to their desk, and writes a five-line summary from memory. Two hundred departures later, the HR system holds two hundred summaries written by three people, at different moments, in different moods, with different levels of detail. Nobody can say what the most common reason for leaving the support team was in 2026, because that information never existed in searchable form — it existed as sound, for half an hour, and then evaporated.

A single interview is an anecdote. Ten interviews transcribed word for word are data. The only difference between the two is the record.

How to record the interview with AI (step by step)

The workflow uses Sintesy and fits into any HR routine:

1. Record the conversation with consent. Ask up front: “Can I record this so we don’t miss any details? The audio becomes a transcript and the material stays restricted to HR”. If the person prefers not to be recorded, do it on a video call and upload the audio captured by the meeting platform, or take notes on the spot and transcribe them right after.
2. Transcribe it. In Sintesy, record straight from the microphone or upload the audio file. A 30-minute interview comes back transcribed in minutes, in Portuguese, with punctuation and paragraphs — not one giant block of running text.
3. Generate the structured summary. Ask for a fixed format for every interview: stated reason for leaving, what would have made the person stay, positives, watch-outs, suggestions, and the verdict — “avoidable exit? yes/no and why”. The AI-generated summary ensures the recurring question (“was this exit avoidable?”) has an answer for every case.
4. Organize by period and team. Create an “Exits 2026” folder (or a subfolder per half-year). Each interview becomes a dated item, with the role and team in the title — “Support · Analyst · Mar 2026”.
5. Export to the employee file. Export the document as a PDF to attach to the case in the HR system, keeping the record alive inside the platform.

Sintesy’s free plan covers up to 60 minutes of transcription per day — more than one entire exit interview per business day.

Where the value shows up: ask the archive, not your memory

Once all the interviews are transcribed in the same folder, the game changes. Sintesy’s chat accepts multiple sources in the same conversation — you select the last ten exit interviews and ask:

“Considering these interviews: what are the three most-cited reasons for leaving? How many people mentioned their own manager? Which ones left over salary, and which over growth?”

The answer comes with the sources for each claim — you’re not reading a guess, you’re reading the synthesis of ten real conversations, with the exact paragraph each pattern came from. If any passage seems surprising, the full transcript is one click away, stored as it was said.

That’s what separates the two worlds:

Notice this is the same thesis as the customer feedback nobody kept — the information has already been said, many times, out loud. The problem was never getting the answer; it was filing it so it would still exist six months later.

Data protection (LGPD): recording, storing, and for how long

The exit interview records personal data — and often sensitive data, when it touches on health, pregnancy, or conflicts. Three precautions solve almost everything:

• Explicit consent for the recording, given in audio at the start of the recording itself. If the person doesn’t want it, the alternative is not to record — and the interview can still deliver, just with a poorer record.
• Restricted purpose: the transcript serves to analyze departure patterns. It doesn’t become fodder to dispute the severance, it isn’t shared with the former colleague mentioned, and it never goes into a future reference.
• Defined retention: set a deadline (12 to 24 months is common) and delete afterwards. Personal data kept without a purpose is liability without a payoff.

Who has access matters too: restrict it to HR. The trust that produces honest answers in 2026 depends on the guarantee, honored, that what was said in 2025 didn’t leak.

Checklist: the exit interview in 7 steps

1. Schedule it between the notice and the last day, in the final week.
2. Invite without pressure: voluntary participation, no effect on the severance process.
3. Have someone neutral conduct it — HR or a manager from another area.
4. Use the same 8-question script in every interview.
5. Ask for consent and record.
6. Transcribe and generate the structured summary in the same format as always.
7. Save it in the period folder and, every quarter, ask the archive: “what is making us lose people?”.

The exit conversation happens one way or another — at the door, over coffee, on the last call. The only decision is whether it becomes a record someone can work with, or evaporates along with the returned badge.