What to Save from Every Job Before You Leave

When you leave a job, the access closes. Email accounts get deactivated. Internal dashboards lock you out. Colleagues you worked with for three years scatter to four new companies, and their work email starts bouncing within a month. Five years later, when a future employer asks "what did you actually do there?" — the proof you'd want to point at is gone, because nobody told you to capture it before the door shut behind you.

The window is the two to four weeks before your last day. Here's what to grab.

TL;DR

• Get personal contacts (email, LinkedIn) for 5–10 people who'd vouch for you — not just your manager.
• Ask your manager for a short written reference now, with a draft they can edit, before your last day.
• Save your own performance reviews and 360 feedback.
• Capture specific metrics, dates, and sources for every significant project you owned.
• Snapshot your own work artifacts within company policy — anything you authored, with proprietary content redacted.

The situation

You're leaving a job — quitting, getting laid off, or moving on. You have a few weeks of access left. Most of the value you spent years building up — the relationships, the verifiable accomplishments, the people who could tell a future employer what kind of work you really do — is about to become unreachable. Most people don't realize this until three years later, mid-job-search, trying to remember the name of the engineer who knew the system best, or what month the migration actually shipped, or whether your manager had your last review on file.

The five moves below take a weekend. They preserve the proof.

1. Get personal contact info for everyone who can vouch for you

Action. Make a list of 5–10 people who saw your work directly. Get a personal email and a LinkedIn URL for each one. Not their work email — that account dies the moment they leave the company.

Why it works. A future hiring manager calling for a reference in three years needs to actually reach someone. The work email you have for your former colleague is worthless if she's worked at three different companies between now and then.

Done right. A spreadsheet or a KredVault entry per person, with: their name, their role when you worked together, the specific work you did together, their personal email, their LinkedIn URL. Aim for breadth — your direct manager, two lateral peers, a cross-functional partner from engineering or design, and a direct report if you had one. Five to ten, not one.

Common mistake. Saving only your manager's contact info. Lateral peers and cross-functional partners often remember more specific things about your work than your manager does, because they saw the day-to-day. Recruiters know this and frequently want to talk to peers, not just bosses.

2. Ask your manager for a written reference now, with a draft attached

Action. Email your manager one to two weeks before your last day. Ask them to write a short summary of what you worked on. Attach a 4-sentence draft they can edit in five minutes.

Why it works. A reference written now, while the work is fresh, is dramatically more specific than one requested three years later. In three years your manager will remember that you worked together. The details — what you led, when, what the impact was — will have faded.

Done right. Send something like: "Hey [Manager], before I head out, would you be willing to write a short summary of my work here? Four sentences is enough. I drafted something to make it easy — feel free to edit, expand, or replace entirely: '[Your Name] led the [specific project] from [start date] to [end date]. They [specific action] and the outcome was [specific result]. They owned [specific area], and [colleague's name] and others worked alongside them on [specific initiative].' If that's not right, anything in your own words is great. Thanks."

Common mistake. Asking for "a recommendation letter" with no draft. An open-ended request becomes a thing on your manager's to-do list that never gets done. A pre-drafted version comes back edited and signed within a week.

3. Save your own performance reviews and 360 feedback

Action. Download or screenshot every performance review, 360 feedback round, and peer review where your work was specifically called out. Store the files outside your work account — personal cloud, personal email, KredVault, anywhere you'll still have access in five years.

Why it works. These documents describe your work in someone else's words. Hiring managers find that more credible than self-assessments, because they were produced under structured review processes, often with multiple reviewers, with real stakes attached. Companies often archive or delete this access when you leave.

Done right. PDF, screenshot, or copy-pasted text of: your most recent annual review, any 360 feedback from the last two years, peer review excerpts where your name and specific work get mentioned. Don't just save the score — save the comments and the specific examples.

Common mistake. Assuming HR will hand these over after you leave if you ask. Some will, many won't, all will take weeks of back-and-forth at a time when you don't want to be doing back-and-forth with your former HR department. Take five minutes now.

4. Capture specific metrics, outcomes, and dates

Action. For every significant project you owned, write down: what shipped, the exact date it shipped, the measurable outcome, and the source of the number.

Why it works. Numbers and dates are what makes a resume bullet checkable. "Increased conversion 30%" is unverifiable and forgettable. "Increased onboarding-to-activation conversion from 12% to 16% on the redesign that shipped 2025-08-15, measured against the prior six-week baseline in Mixpanel" is concrete, dated, and sourced. The systems that hold those numbers — internal analytics, dashboards, ticketing tools — become unreachable the moment your account closes.

Done right. A document with 5–10 entries, one per significant project. Each entry: project name, your specific role, ship date, the metric, what it was before, what it became after, the data source. Pull from internal dashboards while you still have access. If your access is already restricted, ask a colleague who's still in the system to confirm a number for you, and save their email confirmation.

Common mistake. Writing rounded, generic stats from memory. "Grew revenue 50%" without dates, context, or source collapses under any interview question harder than "tell me about that project." The specifics — exact percentages, exact dates, exact sources — are what survive scrutiny.

5. Snapshot your own work artifacts — within policy

Action. Save copies of work you authored that doesn't reveal proprietary, customer, or financial information. Decks you owned, write-ups you wrote, decision memos you authored, documentation you produced.

Why it works. A concrete artifact — a redacted slide, a decision memo, a write-up you authored — is far more compelling evidence than a resume bullet describing the same thing. Hiring managers who ask for work samples are asking specifically for these kinds of artifacts.

Done right. Save PDFs or screenshots of: documents you authored where your name appears as the owner, slides from presentations you delivered, write-ups you wrote, public-facing things you shipped (blog posts, conference talks, public dashboards). Redact customer names, internal financials, and anything labeled confidential. The point is to keep the structure of what you did, not the company's proprietary content.

Common mistake. Saving everything wholesale — customer lists, internal financials, full strategy documents. That's not capture; that's IP theft, and it's a different problem than the one this recipe solves. The line is simple: did you author this, and can it be shared with the company-specific information removed? If yes, save. If no, don't.

How verification turns capture into proof

The five moves above produce a folder of artifacts: contact info, a written reference, performance reviews, project metrics, redacted work samples. That folder is enormously valuable — but on its own, it's still a collection of things you assembled about yourself. A skeptical hiring manager still has to take it on faith that the reference is real, the metrics are accurate, and the contact emails go to who you say they go to.

The capstone move is making each piece checkable without requiring you to broker introductions or wait for a colleague to find time for a phone call. A verifiable career record holds each capture as a verified entry — the manager's reference signed by the manager, the metric attested by the colleague who pulled it, the artifact tied to the project it came from. Five years from now, the answer to "did this person actually do this?" doesn't depend on whether your old colleague picks up the phone, because the proof traveled with you and the verifier's signature traveled with it.

The two to four weeks before you leave is the cheapest time you will ever have to capture this material. Do it once, before the door closes.

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Continue reading

• What is a verifiable career record (and why your resume isn't one) — the thesis behind why these captures matter
• Employment Verification: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters for Your Next Job — the mechanics of how a future employer would actually check
• Should You Use ChatGPT or Claude to Write Your Resume? — what AI can and can't do once you have real evidence to put in a resume