You just lost your best engineer. Or your top account manager. Or the person who quietly held the whole team together and nobody noticed until they were gone.
Now you're running an exit interview, trying to find out what went wrong. But the honest answer is usually simple: nobody asked while they were still around.
That's what stay interviews fix. They're short, structured conversations with people you want to keep - done before they start job hunting, not after they've already decided to leave. Gallup's 2024 research found that 42% of voluntary departures are preventable. The catch is you have to act before the resignation letter lands on your desk.
What is a stay interview?
A stay interview is a one-on-one conversation between a manager and a current employee. The goal is simple: find out what keeps them here, what might push them away, and what you can do about it.
A stay interview is simpler than a performance review, a feedback session, or a survey. It's a direct question: what would make you stay, and what might make you leave?
The difference between a stay interview and an exit interview is timing. Exit interviews happen after someone has already decided to go. Stay interviews happen while you still have a chance to change the outcome.
Stay interviews work best as regular check-ins (quarterly or biannually), not one-off events. A single conversation can surface a problem. Regular conversations show you whether your fixes are working.
Why they matter now
The numbers paint a clear picture. Gallup's 2024 State of the Global Workplace report found that 52% of employees believe it's a good time to find a new job. That's more than half your team with one eye on the door.
And the reasons they leave are often fixable. An iHire 2024 survey of over 2,000 workers found that 32.4% left their last job because of a toxic work environment - the single most common reason, ahead of pay and growth. You can't fix toxicity after someone's already gone. But you can spot it early if you ask the right questions.
Meanwhile, Gallup found that 45% of people who voluntarily left hadn't had a single conversation about their job satisfaction in the three months before resigning. Nobody checked in. Nobody asked. They just left.
Stay interviews close that gap.
25 stay interview questions by theme
Not every question works in every situation. Organise them by what they uncover so you can pick the right ones for each person.
Job satisfaction and motivation
These questions help you understand what's working - so you can protect it.
- What do you look forward to most when you come to work?
- What part of your job would you happily never do again?
- When was the last time you felt genuinely proud of something you did here?
- What drains your energy the most during a typical week?
- If you could spend more time on one thing at work, what would it be?
Question 4 is underrated. People rarely mention energy drains in performance reviews, but they're often the thing that tips someone from "this is fine" to "I'm updating my LinkedIn."
Growth and development
People don't just want a job. They want a direction. These questions reveal whether they can see one.
- Do you feel like you're learning and growing in your role?
- What skills would you like to develop that you aren't using right now?
- Where do you see your career heading in the next two years?
- Is there a role or project in the company that you'd love to try?
- Do you feel your strengths are being used well here?
LinkedIn's Workplace Learning Report found that organisations with a strong focus on career development see 17 percentage points higher retention than those without. Growth paths aren't a nice-to-have. They're a retention strategy.
Management and support
The manager relationship is the make-or-break factor. These questions surface problems that employees rarely volunteer on their own.
- Do you feel you get enough feedback on your work?
- Is there anything I could do differently to support you better?
- Do you feel comfortable coming to me with problems or concerns?
- How would you describe the level of trust on our team?
- What's one thing that would make your day-to-day work easier?
Question 12 is the hardest one for managers to ask. It puts the spotlight directly on them. But it's also the most valuable - if someone's leaving because of their manager, this is the only question that'll surface it before it's too late.
Culture and belonging
Culture problems are invisible to leadership but obvious to the people living in them every day.
- Do you feel like your work is valued and recognised?
- Is there anything about the team or company culture that bothers you?
- Do you feel included in decisions that affect your work?
- Would you recommend this company to a friend looking for a job?
- How well does our company's stated values match what actually happens day to day?
Question 20 is where you find the gap between the poster on the wall and the reality on the ground. If there's a wide gap, people notice - and they lose trust quietly.
Retention risk signals
These are the direct questions. They're uncomfortable, but they're the reason you're doing this.
- Have you thought about leaving in the past six months?
- What would make you seriously consider another offer?
- Is there anything that nearly made you leave that we don't know about?
- What would need to change for you to see yourself here in three years?
- If a competitor offered you the same role tomorrow, what would make you stay here?
Don't bury these at the end. They're the point of the whole conversation. If someone gives you a specific answer to question 22, you've just been handed a retention roadmap.
| Situation | Focus areas | Suggested questions |
|---|---|---|
| New hire (3-6 months in) | Role fit, onboarding, expectations | 1, 3, 6, 8, 13 |
| High performer you can't afford to lose | Growth, recognition, risk signals | 5, 9, 10, 16, 22, 25 |
| Team with recent departures | Culture, management, belonging | 14, 17, 18, 20, 23 |
| Remote or hybrid employee | Connection, support, energy | 4, 11, 14, 15, 18 |
When and how often to run them
Quarterly is the sweet spot for most teams. Frequent enough to catch problems early, not so frequent that it becomes a chore.
Some teams do them biannually, which works if you're also running regular engagement surveys in between. The survey catches broad trends, the stay interview digs into individual situations.
Timing within the quarter matters too. Don't schedule them during performance review season. People conflate the two and give you performance-review answers instead of honest ones. Pick a different week entirely.
Who goes first? Start with the people you'd be most upset to lose. Not because they're more important, but because the risk-to-effort ratio is highest. If you can only run five stay interviews this quarter, run them with your five biggest retention risks.
Why async video gets more honest answers
Here's the problem with live stay interviews: they're conversations with your boss. No matter how good the relationship is, there's a power dynamic. People filter. They soften the hard stuff. They skip the parts that feel too risky.
A study published in Social Science Computer Methods (n=1,067) found that people give more candid, detailed answers in prerecorded video than in live interviews or text surveys. When someone records alone, the social pressure disappears. They say what they actually think, not what feels safe to say in the moment.
Async video stay interviews work like this:
- You record short video prompts for each question. Your face, your voice, 15-20 seconds each. This makes it feel personal without the pressure of a live call.
- The employee gets a link and records their answers whenever they're ready. Could be at their desk, could be at home, could be on a walk. No scheduling needed.
- You review the recordings on your own time. Watch for tone, energy, hesitation - the things a written survey can't capture.
This format is especially useful for remote teams spread across time zones, where scheduling a live stay interview with every team member is a logistics nightmare.
With Clipform, you can set up a stay interview as a video form in a few minutes. Record your prompts, share a link, and let people respond on camera. Responses come back with auto-generated transcripts, so you get both the emotional context of video and searchable text for spotting patterns across the team.
The best stay interviews feel like genuine curiosity, not an HR exercise. Recording your prompts on video (rather than typing them) sets that tone from the start.
What to do with the answers
Collecting stay interview data is only useful if you act on it.
Respond within a week. If someone tells you they're frustrated by a lack of growth opportunities, don't let three months pass before addressing it. Even a quick "I heard you, here's what I'm looking into" builds trust.
Track themes across interviews. One person mentioning a lack of recognition is a data point. Four people on the same team saying it is a pattern. Tag responses by theme (growth, management, culture, compensation, workload) and review them as a set.
Close the loop visibly. When a stay interview leads to a change - a new project assignment, a process fix, a team restructure - say so. "You mentioned X, so we did Y" is the single most powerful thing you can say to someone you're trying to retain. It proves the conversation wasn't theatre.
Don't punish honesty. If someone tells you they've been thinking about leaving, that takes courage. Reacting defensively or treating them differently afterward guarantees they'll never be honest with you again - and they'll leave without warning next time.
Start before they start looking
The difference between organisations that retain talent and those that watch it walk away usually isn't compensation. It's whether anyone bothered to ask "what would keep you here?" before it was too late.
You don't need to run stay interviews with everyone at once. Start with five people - the ones whose departure would hurt the most. Pick 8-10 questions from this list. Run them async so people feel safe being honest. And when someone tells you what they need, act on it.
The 42% preventable turnover figure from Gallup isn't a stat about HR policy. It's a stat about conversations that never happened. Stay interviews make sure they do.
