What Leavers Are Actually Saying
The move in short
Connector — Once a month the head of people exports all completed exit-interview form responses from the HR system into a single document, pastes them into Claude with a standing prompt, and receives back a synthesised pattern report — top-three stated reasons for leaving, any team or manager name appearing more than twice, verbatim quotes worth escalating, and one suggested policy question for the leadership team — replacing an analysis task that previously never happened.
The Company
Halvorsen Home Care runs domiciliary and personal care services across Bergen and the surrounding municipalities. About 110 people, most of them care workers out on the road. They handle everything from daily visits for elderly clients to more intensive support packages. It's a staffing-heavy, margin-tight operation, and getting the right people through the door and keeping them is basically the whole job.
The Pain
Silje is the head of people. Every quarter she's got somewhere around forty completed exit interview forms sitting in the HR system. She knows the turnover rate is bad — worse than most comparable services in the region — but she genuinely doesn't know what's driving it. The forms are there. She just never gets to them. By the time she's dealt with recruitment, rota issues, and whatever's come up that week, reading forty free-text responses in any kind of systematic way doesn't happen. So the information sits there. She keeps meaning to get to it. She doesn't.
The Move
Once a month, Silje exports all the completed exit forms from that quarter into a single document and pastes them into Claude with a standing prompt she's written once and saved.
The prompt asks for four things: the top three reasons people say they're leaving, any team name or manager name that appears more than twice, a handful of verbatim quotes that seem worth escalating, and one policy question worth putting to the leadership team.
She gets a structured report back in a few minutes. Not a perfect piece of research — she knows that. But it's a real summary of what forty people actually wrote, which is forty more than she was reading before.
The standing prompt took her maybe half an hour to get right the first time. Now the monthly task is the export and the paste. That's it.
The blind spot
The forms feel like a reading task, not an analysis task. So everyone assumes the fix is finding time to read. And nobody ever has that time, so it doesn't happen. It doesn't occur to most people that you can hand a pile of unstructured text to a language model and ask it to find the patterns for you. It's not obvious until you've seen it done.
The pattern
This same move works anywhere you've got a backlog of text responses that aren't being read:
- A customer success manager with six months of support tickets nobody's ever looked at for themes
- A school or training provider sitting on a year's worth of course feedback forms
- A clinic or practice with patient experience surveys that go into a folder and stay there