HR Workflow

How to Run an Exit Interview with Claude

You'll finish with a structured question set before the meeting and a shareable debrief report after it — even if you got 30 minutes' notice, the employee is leaving on bad terms, and you have no exit interview process in place. Two prompts. That's the whole thing.

Free 15 min Freelancers & HR consultants

TL;DR

Claude generates a tailored question set from a two-minute context brief — no template needed.
Paste your rough notes after the interview; Claude turns them into a structured debrief in under a minute.
Works even with no formal exit process — Claude fills the structural gap.
The whole thing — prep, interview, report — fits inside 15 minutes of actual work.

Before you start

A Claude.ai account — the free plan handles both the question-generation and the debrief synthesis without issue.
The employee's role, tenure, and the stated reason they're leaving — even if it's vague ("pursuing other opportunities" is enough to work with). Don't try to verify or expand it before the interview.
Any relevant background: a recent restructure, a management change, a known team tension. One sentence is fine — you're giving Claude something to work from, not writing a brief.
A way to take notes during the interview — a notes app, a doc, even paper. You're capturing their words, not transcribing; bullet points are plenty.

How to do it — step by step

Pull together context on the departing employee

Start by spending two minutes writing down what you actually know: the employee's role and how long they've been there, what team they're on, and the reason they gave for leaving — even if it's a one-liner. Then add anything you know about the situation: a recent reorg, a promotion they didn't get, a manager they clashed with, a competitor they mentioned. You're not trying to build a case — you're giving Claude enough to ask the right questions. Spend an extra minute here on the specifics because vague context produces generic questions, and generic questions produce short, unhelpful answers in the actual interview. If you use an HR workflow system where you track employee notes, pull from it now — even one or two relevant observations make the output sharper.

Generate a tailored question set

Now open Claude and paste the question-generation prompt below with your context filled in. Claude will return a set of questions grouped by theme — reasons for leaving, role and day-to-day experience, management and team dynamics, what the company could have done differently, what would have made them stay. Don't worry if some questions feel too direct for your specific situation: that's what the next 30 seconds are for. In the same conversation, ask Claude to soften or reframe any question that feels off for this particular person. The HR Prompt Builder has pre-built variations for sensitive departure scenarios — worth bookmarking if you run these regularly.

Run the interview using the questions as a guide

At this point, you have a question set — use it as a map, not a script. Follow the employee's answers; if they volunteer something useful unprompted, go there. Jot down the specific things they mention: a project name, a decision they disagreed with, a moment they felt unsupported. Those details are what make the debrief useful; their emotional tone mostly isn't.

Paste your notes and generate the debrief

Before moving on to anything else, open Claude and run the debrief synthesis prompt while your notes are still fresh. Paste whatever you captured — bullet points, half-sentences, direct quotes — and Claude will organise the feedback by theme, flag any patterns or recurring concerns, and produce a structured summary in a format you can actually share. This is where the AI for HR Teams hub has useful guidance if you need to tailor the report for a specific stakeholder — a board, a department head, or a founding team that wants the raw picture rather than a polished summary. Either way, the synthesis takes under two minutes.

Review, anonymise if needed, and share

Read the debrief once and check two things: that the conclusions actually match what the employee said (Claude occasionally over-interprets a single comment into a broader theme), and that nothing in the report identifies colleagues by name or in a way that creates a different problem for you. Replace any name-adjacent details with role labels. Then cross-check any direct quotes you're including against your notes — accurate attribution matters, especially if the report is going to someone with the authority to act on it. Once you're satisfied, paste into your HR system, email, or document. Start to finish, you're done well inside 15 minutes.

The prompts

You are helping me prepare for an exit interview with a departing employee.

Context:
- Employee role and tenure: [e.g. Senior Account Manager, 3 years]
- Stated reason for leaving: [e.g. "pursuing a new opportunity" / "accepted a role closer to home" / left blank]
- Relevant background: [e.g. team restructure last quarter, change in line manager six months ago, or leave blank if none]
- Interview tone: [e.g. conversational and open / structured and time-limited to 30 minutes]
- Stakeholder for the debrief: [e.g. founding team / HR director / direct manager — helps me calibrate the depth of questions]

Generate a structured set of exit interview questions for this employee. Group the questions by theme: reasons for leaving, role and day-to-day experience, team and management, what the company could have done differently, and what would have made them stay. Keep the language neutral and non-leading — the goal is to give the employee space to say what they actually think, not to confirm what we already suspect.

Include 2–3 questions per theme. Flag any question that might feel confrontational given the context I've provided, and suggest an alternative phrasing for those.

You are helping me write a debrief report from an exit interview I just conducted.

Context:
- Employee role and tenure: [e.g. Senior Account Manager, 3 years]
- Debrief audience: [e.g. HR director / founding team / direct line manager — I'll use this to calibrate the level of detail]
- Anonymisation needed: [Yes / No — if yes, remove identifying details and refer to the employee by role only]

My interview notes:
[Paste your rough notes here — bullet points, partial sentences, direct quotes, anything you captured. Don't clean them up first.]

Using only the notes above, write a structured exit interview debrief with the following sections:
1. Key themes — the 2–3 main things that came up repeatedly or with the most emphasis
2. Role and experience feedback — what they said about the job itself, workload, and day-to-day
3. Management and team — any feedback on their direct manager, team dynamics, or leadership more broadly
4. What the company could have done differently — their specific suggestions or observations, not your interpretation
5. Risk indicators — anything in the notes that suggests a systemic issue worth flagging (e.g. a concern shared across multiple conversations, a pattern that needs attention)
6. Recommended actions — 1–3 concrete next steps based on what was said, framed as options not directives

Do not add content that isn't in my notes. If a section has no evidence from the interview, say "Not discussed" rather than filling it with generics.

What the debrief output looks like

Example output — debrief synthesis

Key themes

Three topics came up consistently: limited visibility into career progression, a change in direct manager that altered the day-to-day dynamic significantly, and a sense that the volume of administrative work had grown beyond the scope of the original role. These weren't presented as grievances — more as the cumulative reasons a better offer became an easy decision to accept.

Management and team

The previous line manager was mentioned positively and repeatedly. The transition to the current manager six months ago was described as "a different style" — less frequent 1-on-1s, more directive feedback. No serious friction was reported, but the relationship was clearly less of a retention factor than it had been. The team itself was described as strong; leaving colleagues was cited as one of the harder parts of the decision.

Risk indicators

The administrative scope comment is worth a follow-up with the remaining team — if workload composition has shifted for one person, it's likely shifted for others. The career progression concern aligns with two other informal conversations from Q2; this may be a pattern worth surfacing.

Claude vs Gemini for this workflow

Dimension	Claude	Gemini
Neutral, non-leading question phrasing	Better	Good
Staying within your notes only	Better	Good
Flagging sensitive question phrasing	Better	Good
Integration with Google Docs	Good	Better
Speed on free plan	Good	Better
Overall recommendation	Recommended	Solid alternative

How to customise this workflow

For small business owners with no HR background

Add one line to the question-generation prompt: "I have no formal HR background — flag any question that might feel too clinical or corporate for a small team setting and suggest a more direct alternative." You'll get questions that sound like a real conversation rather than a process. If the employee is leaving on good terms, also ask Claude: "Suggest two questions I can use to explore whether this person would consider returning in a future role." Retention pipelines work better than you'd think, and an exit interview is an underused place to start one. The AI for HR Teams hub has a short guide on building that kind of alumni network without a dedicated HR team.

For independent HR consultants doing this across multiple clients

Don't rewrite the prompt for each client — save a version per client type in your notes tool and swap in the relevant stakeholder audience and anonymisation setting before each run. The debrief format changes a lot depending on whether the output is going to a founder, a department head, or a board. The HR Prompt Builder is worth using here: you configure the prompt once per scenario and reuse it across engagements without rebuilding from scratch each time.

For high-volume departures — restructures, layoffs, team closures

Skip this if you're handling a single exit — but if you're running five or more interviews in the same period, change the debrief prompt slightly: after pasting your notes, add "I've run multiple exit interviews this week — identify any themes or concerns that appeared in more than one conversation." You'll need to paste all your notes into a single message. Claude handles the synthesis well, and the cross-interview pattern recognition is where it earns its place — spotting the same complaint twice is the signal that tends to get dismissed when it comes from one person.

For difficult or contentious departures

Before moving on to the interview itself, add this to the question-generation prompt: "The departure is contentious — the employee has raised concerns [briefly describe the nature, e.g. about a specific manager / about the redundancy process]. Generate questions that give them space to share their perspective without leading them toward any particular conclusion." Claude will produce questions that are genuinely open rather than defensively framed, which matters both for the quality of the feedback you get and for how the conversation feels to the person leaving.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use this workflow with the free version of Claude?

Yes — the free plan at claude.ai handles both the question generation and the debrief synthesis in the same session. Where it gets tight is if you're running several interviews in one day and pasting long note sets for each. In that case, either space the sessions out or move to Claude Pro. For a single interview, free is fine.

Is it safe to paste employee feedback into Claude?

Anthropic doesn't use your conversations to train Claude by default. That said, check your organisation's or client's data handling policy before pasting identifiable information into any external tool. The practical workaround: replace names with role labels ("the senior designer", "the departing account manager") and remove any detail that makes a specific person identifiable. The debrief quality is identical, and you stay on the right side of most data policies without any extra effort.

What if the employee barely said anything useful?

That happens — some people keep it polite and surface-level regardless of what you ask. Paste the thin notes anyway; Claude will return a short debrief that accurately reflects what was (and wasn't) said, and add a "Not discussed" note for sections with no evidence. That's a more honest record than a padded summary. The absence of candid feedback is itself useful information: it tells you the interview format or the relationship didn't create enough safety for honesty, which is worth noting for the next one. The HR Workflows hub has guidance on building the kind of ongoing relationship that makes exit conversations more candid.

How do I handle it if the employee names specific colleagues?

Include the detail in your notes but flag it in the debrief synthesis prompt: add a line like "The employee named specific colleagues — in the report, replace individual names with role labels and note that specific names are held separately." Claude will produce a report that captures the substance of the feedback without attributing it to named individuals. Keep your original notes with the actual names filed securely — you may need them if the situation escalates, but they shouldn't be in a document that circulates to stakeholders.