Exit Interviews
PurpletGo's exit interview module lets HR build simple feedback forms, schedule the actual conversation through Calendly, Google Calendar, or a manual entry, and record the employee's answers against the offboarding record. Once a response is submitted, PurpletGo runs it through an AI sentiment pass in the background so you get a sentiment score and a handful of themes without reading every transcript yourself.
Exit interviews are available on every plan. Scheduling through Calendly or Google Calendar and the AI sentiment pass need the Team or Enterprise plan.
Building a form
Exit interview templates are reusable question sets you assign to an offboarding record. They're managed from Settings → Exit Interviews, which needs the Manage exit interview questions permission: Admins, Super Admins and HR by default, or any custom role that grants it.
Field types
The template builder supports five question types:
| Field type | Use case |
|---|---|
| Text | Short open-ended answers |
| Textarea | Longer open-ended answers - this is what feeds the sentiment analysis |
| Rating | Numeric satisfaction scores |
| Yes/No | Quick binary questions |
| Select | A fixed list of choices - type one option per line |
Each question can also be marked Required.
Creating a template
Go to Settings → Exit Interviews, click New Template, give it a name, and add questions one at a time - type a label, pick a field type, mark it required if you need to, and repeat. Use the arrows on a question to move it up or down. A template needs at least one question, every question needs a label, and a Select question needs at least one option. Click Create Template to save it. There's no drafting or conditional-logic step; what you build is what gets used.
Editing a template
Click the pencil on a template to reopen it in the same form, pre-filled. You can rename it, add, remove and reorder questions, change a question's label, type or required flag, and edit the options on a Select question. Click Save Changes to save. If the server rejects the change - say a question lost its label - the dialog stays open with what you typed and shows what went wrong.
Editing a template changes it for everyone, including interviews already assigned but not yet answered. Answers already recorded keep the questions they were captured against, so past responses and their analytics are unaffected. Archived templates can't be edited: restore one first if you need to change it.
Deleting, archiving and restoring a template
Answers are never deleted along with a template. When you delete a template (after you confirm):
- if nobody has answered it yet, it is deleted
- if it has responses, it is archived instead: it's no longer offered when assigning an interview and can't start new ones, but every response, its sentiment and themes, and the analytics built on them are kept - including for offboardings under legal hold. An interview already assigned with it can still have its answers recorded
Archived templates are listed under Archived templates at the bottom of the list, with a Restore button that makes them available again. They have no Edit action while archived - restore one first.
You can keep more than one template around - for example, a shorter one for contract-end departures and a fuller one for voluntary resignations - and pick whichever fits when you assign an interview to an offboarding.
Assigning and recording a response
From an employee's offboarding record, open the Exit Interview card and assign one of your templates. Once assigned, HR or an admin records the employee's answers directly on that record - there's no separate self-service form the employee fills out themselves. Submitting (or re-submitting) a response kicks off sentiment analysis automatically in the background.
Scheduling a session
The actual interview meeting can be scheduled three ways, from the same Exit Interview card:
Requires Calendly connected under Settings → Integrations. Pick an event type and PurpletGo generates a one-off Calendly booking link and emails it to the employee: to their personal email when the offboarding (or their directory record) has one, otherwise to their work email. The card shows where and when it was sent; Resend link emails it again, and the copy button is still there if you'd rather send it yourself. If the email can't be sent, the schedule is kept and the card says so. When the employee books, a Calendly webhook updates the schedule status and meeting time on the offboarding record automatically, whether they booked with their work or personal email address.
Rescheduling cancels the previous schedule and creates a new one; cancelling a schedule also tries to cancel the underlying Calendly or Google Calendar event.
AI sentiment analysis
When a response with open-text (Textarea) answers is submitted, PurpletGo sends those answers to an AI model in the background and stores back a sentiment (positive/neutral/negative), a -1 to 1 sentiment score, a one-sentence summary, and up to three themes drawn from a fixed list (compensation, management, career growth, work-life balance, culture, remote work, team dynamics, role clarity, benefits, relocation, personal reasons, other). If your org hasn't configured an AI provider, or the response has no text answers, the analysis is simply skipped and the response is saved without sentiment data.
Analytics dashboard
The Exit Interviews tab on the Analytics page (/analytics) shows, for responses submitted in the page's date range (both days included) and the departments you can see:
- Overall sentiment distribution and average score
- A month-by-month sentiment trend
- Sentiment broken down by department and by separation type
- Which themes come up most often across responses
- A list of the lowest-sentiment responses (score below -0.3), so you can spot retention risks quickly
A month, department or separation type with no analysed responses yet is left out of the charts rather than shown as a neutral score. It needs the exit_interviews_view permission.