7 Colleagues to Text (Not Email) Before You Leave a Job

Here's the short answer. Text (not email) the seven colleagues who already have your number, who you've traded a real personal moment with, and who would be surprised to get a mass farewell email instead of a warm two-line message. That means close teammates, your covered-for-you person, the mentor who moved with you across roles, and a small handful of others. Everyone else gets the group email.

The confusion is understandable. Most guides tell you to send the same warm goodbye through every channel: an email, a Slack post, a LinkedIn note. That treats the message like content. It isn't. The channel is part of the message. A text says "you are someone I already reach for outside of work." An email says "you are on my professional list." Both are fine. Neither is the other.

This is what most people get wrong. They send the group farewell email at 10:30 on their last day and assume it covers the six or seven people who deserved a text at 8am the night before. It doesn't. Those seven find out you left in the same paragraph as the sixty other people they barely worked with, and something quietly cools between you.

Why text is different

Text is an intimate channel. If someone has your personal number, one of two things happened. Either they already texted you about a sick day, a real-life problem, or a personal thing outside work. Or you swapped numbers at an offsite, a conference, or a dinner and it felt like a moment. Both are relationships that outlived work hours before you decided to leave.

Email lives on the company server. Text lives on the phone in your pocket. The people in the second category read the message from the couch at 8pm, not from their laptop between meetings. That's the whole point. Save texts for the six or seven who belong there.

The seven colleagues to text

1. The close teammate who already has your number

This is the easiest one. If you've been texting each other for a year about lunch, a broken build, or a shared meme, they get a text. Sending them an email instead reads as a small snub — as if the friendship existed only inside the company Slack. Two lines is enough. "Wanted you to hear this from me before the group email tomorrow: last day is Friday. Grabbing dinner sometime this month?"

2. The person who covered for you when you were out

The teammate who took your Monday standup when you had a family thing. The peer who kept your client happy the week you were sick. You owe them a text specifically because they gave you something that never showed up on any performance review. This one lands best as a thank-you first, news second. "I don't know if I ever properly thanked you for covering the Peterson call in March. I'm leaving on the 30th, and I wanted you to know that meant something."

3. The mentor who moved between roles or companies with you

The person who has been in your corner for two roles or ten years. They get a text because the relationship predates the current company and will outlast it. This is not the mentor you should email. Emailing them is a category error — like sending a birthday card to a friend by DocuSign. If you want a longer treatment of the mentor thank-you, our mentor thank-you guide pairs well with this.

4. The friend-first-coworker-second in another department

You met at the new-hire orientation, or at a company hackathon, or in a Slack channel about coffee shops. You have never worked on the same project, but you've had lunch every other Thursday for two years. Your org chart says you don't have a professional reason to know about their day. Your text history says otherwise. They get a text. The group email would land as a weird kind of demotion.

5. The colleague you exchanged numbers with at an offsite or event

The one you spent the whole company retreat with. The person you sat next to at a client dinner and stayed talking to until midnight. Numbers were exchanged and then almost never used, because the moment was in-person and you both went back to Slack afterward. Text them. That number in your phone is the entire relationship — proof it happened, proof you both wanted to hold onto it. Not using it now is what makes it fade.

6. The old boss you still call sometimes

Not your current manager (they get told first, in person or on video, per our telling-your-boss script). The old boss. The one from two roles ago who moved to another company, sent you a nice note when you got promoted, and takes your call when you're weighing a decision. You don't email that person your resignation news. You text them.

7. The quiet person your calendar remembers but your brain forgot

This is the one most people miss. There is almost always a colleague you had eleven one-on-ones with over the last twelve months who never made it onto your emotional "people who mattered" list — maybe because they were quiet, maybe because they moved teams, maybe because your brain over-weights the loudest voices in the room. When you actually look at your calendar, they show up. You already have their number from a work-related emergency six months ago. Text them.

Knowing who this seventh person actually is takes a real look at your last twelve months of calendar entries. Memory is unreliable here — it drops the quiet person and remembers the loud one. That's the specific problem It Was Great Working With You was built to solve. Upload your calendar, and it gives you back the honest list of who you spent time with. Most people find three or four names they would have missed.

What to actually write in the text

This is the simplest way to do this. Two to four sentences. No throat-clearing. One specific thing about the relationship, the news, and a real plan to see them (not a vague "let's grab coffee"). Straight quotes, plain hyphens, no exclamation marks doing the work of warmth.

A template that works for almost all seven personas:

• Line 1 — Warn them the group email is coming. "Hey, wanted you to hear this from me before the group email tomorrow morning."
• Line 2 — The news + one specific. "Friday's my last day. Working on [broad shape of new thing, no company name yet]."
• Line 3 — The concrete follow-up. "Dinner Tuesday of the week after? I owe you the long version." Or: "Coffee at Ritual on the 12th if you're free — my treat."

That's it. Do not send a screenshot of your resignation letter. Do not attach a long career retrospective. Do not use it to preview the group email verbatim — they are getting that tomorrow. The text is doing the specific job the group email cannot: telling them individually, in the channel they actually check first, that they mattered enough to hear it first.

Timing

Send these texts the evening before the group farewell email goes out. Not the same morning, not the day before. The evening before. This puts the message in their pocket while they're eating dinner or getting ready for bed. It gives them the whole night to process before they get pinged tomorrow by the wider announcement. And it means you're not visibly on your phone at your desk sending seven messages in a row on your last morning.

If you can only pick one hour to do all seven, use the walk home from work on the second-to-last day. One at a time, thirty seconds each. Do not batch them into a single group text — that undoes the whole point of picking these seven people out.

Who NOT to text

Three groups get the group email, not the text:

• Anyone whose number you don't already have. Do not ask for a personal number on your last week specifically so you can text them goodbye. It reads as forced intimacy at the worst possible moment.
• Anyone senior you don't already have a two-way relationship with. A skip-level you barely know gets a proper email or a scheduled call — see whether to book that skip-level meeting for the tactical version.
• Anyone the friction is with. A strained peer, a difficult manager, a client who complained: they get the professional farewell email, no more.

Edge cases

A few common situations that don't fit the default seven-text pattern:

You're being laid off with same-day access cut. Text is now your primary channel to almost everyone — because your work email will be off by the time this article gets read. Send the seven personal texts first, then a short LinkedIn note to the wider group. Skip the polished corporate goodbye email; there's no time and it isn't the shape of the moment.

You work fully remote and have never met most of your team in person. The seven you'd text are probably the ones you have on WhatsApp or iMessage from a company retreat, a virtual happy hour that migrated off Zoom, or a Slack DM that quietly became a texting relationship. If you have exactly zero personal numbers from work, that is fine — the group email carries more weight in a remote culture, and a short 1:1 video call replaces the text for the two or three closest people.

Your team uses Signal, WhatsApp, or iMessage as the effective work chat. Same principle. The channel counts as "text" for our purposes. What matters is that the seven people receive a private, personal message on the platform where you already talk to them daily — not the group announcement.

The rule of thumb, one line

If you had to bet real money on whether they would text you first at some point in the next two years, they get a text now. Everyone else gets the group email. That's the whole test. Getting the seven people right is worth ten times the effort of writing a better group farewell email, because the group email will be scanned in fifteen seconds and the text will be re-read at 10pm.

Once you have your list of seven, send them tonight. The group email can wait until tomorrow. And if you're not sure who the seventh person is, find your farewell list — your calendar will surface someone your memory quietly dropped.