Stay Interview Questions: 18 to Ask and How to Run Them

A stay interview is a structured one-on-one conversation in which a manager asks a current employee what keeps them in the job, what might pull them away, and what would make their work better. Good stay interview questions are open, specific and focused on things the manager can actually change.

This guide is for HR leaders and people managers who want to catch fixable turnover before it shows up in a resignation letter.

Key takeaways

• A stay interview happens while the employee still works for you, so you can act on what you hear. An exit interview only explains a loss after it happens.
• In a Gallup survey of U.S. workers who quit in the prior year, 42% said their manager or organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving.
• The direct manager should run the conversation, not HR. SHRM guidance says HR should step in only in exceptional circumstances.
• Plan 30 minutes per stay interview, keep it separate from performance reviews, and hold it one-on-one, ideally in person.
• The interview is only useful if it ends with a short, written stay plan that the manager follows up on within weeks, not months.

What is a stay interview, and why does it matter?

A stay interview is a scheduled, individual conversation that asks why an employee stays and what would make them more likely to keep staying. It matters because most of the reasons people leave are visible well before they resign, if someone asks.

In Richard Finnegan's SHRM excerpt on conducting stay interviews, it is defined as a structured discussion a leader holds with one employee to find specific actions that strengthen that person's engagement and retention. The word "specific" is the point: you are building a short to-do list for one relationship.

The need is real. Gallup's research on preventable turnover, based on a November 2023 survey of 717 U.S. employees who had voluntarily left a job in the past year, found that 42% said their manager or organization could have prevented the departure. Even more telling, 45% said no manager or leader had proactively discussed their job satisfaction, performance or future with the organization in the three months before they left.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), the government's monthly count of hires, openings and separations, reported 3.1 million quits in August 2026, a quits rate of 1.9 percent. If you need a refresher on how quits fit into the wider picture, see this explainer on employee turnover definitions and formulas.

There is also a research basis for asking why people stay rather than only why they leave. Mitchell and colleagues' 2001 study in the Academy of Management Journal introduced job embeddedness: the links a person has to colleagues and groups, how well they fit the job and community, and what they would give up by leaving. Embeddedness predicted voluntary turnover beyond what job satisfaction and commitment explained. Good stay interview questions map onto those three ideas.

How is a stay interview different from an exit interview or an engagement survey?

An exit interview tells you why someone already left, an engagement survey tells you how a group feels, and a stay interview tells you what one current person needs. You need all three, but only the stay interview produces an individual action you can take this month.

Feature	Stay interview	Exit interview	Engagement survey
Timing	While the employee is still committed	After notice is given	Annual or periodic pulse
Who runs it	Direct manager	Usually HR	HR or a survey vendor
Unit of analysis	One person	One departing person	Teams and the organization
Anonymity	None, by design	Usually confidential	Usually anonymous or aggregated
Main output	An individual stay plan	Reasons for loss, trend data	Scores and themes
Can it save this employee?	Yes	Rarely	Indirectly

Surveys still show you which teams to prioritize. If you run them through your HR system, this guide to gauging employee satisfaction with HRMS surveys covers the mechanics. Use survey results to decide where stay interviews are most urgent, then use the interviews to find out what is actually going on.

Who should run stay interviews?

The employee's direct manager should run the stay interview, because the manager controls most of what makes a job worth staying in: workload, schedule, recognition, development and daily treatment.

Finnegan's SHRM guidance is blunt on this: leaders at every level conduct them, HR steps in only in exceptional cases, and "I'm too busy" is not a valid reason to hand them off. His recommended rollout is a cascade. The top executive interviews their own direct reports first, and the process moves down to first-line supervisors, so every leader experiences a stay interview as an employee before running one.

HR's job is different. HR designs the questions, trains managers, tracks completion and looks for patterns across teams. Many managers have never been taught this, the gap described in equipping managers as the last mile of HR.

The one real exception: if the manager is the problem, a skip-level leader or an HR business partner should hold the conversation instead.

How do you run a stay interview, step by step?

Schedule it in advance, explain the purpose, ask a small set of open questions, probe, take notes, and close by agreeing on one or two actions with dates. Then follow through.

1. Decide the order. Start with a team member you have an easy rapport with to build your confidence, then move to the people whose loss would hurt most, as Finnegan suggests.
2. Book 30 minutes. Most stay interviews take about 20 minutes, but the extra time keeps you from rushing a good answer.
3. Tell people why. Explain to the whole team that you are holding these conversations with everyone and why. Being vague about the purpose makes people suspicious, a point SHRM's article on what companies get wrong with stay interviews makes directly.
4. Keep it apart from performance. Never combine it with a review or a raise discussion. Use your performance appraisal and feedback process for ratings, and keep this conversation about the job, not the grade.
5. Open with a short script. Something like: "I want to understand what keeps you here and what I can do to make this job better for you. I can't promise to fix everything, but I'll be honest about what I can do."
6. Ask, then probe. Pick five to seven questions from the list below. After each answer, ask "Can you give me an example?" or "What would better look like?" before moving on.
7. Take notes. Capture the employee's own words for key answers.
8. Close with actions. Summarize what you heard, name one or two things you will do, and give a date for your next check-in.
9. Follow up within two weeks. Report what you did, even if the answer is "I tried and here is why it didn't work."

Guidance differs on sending questions ahead: Finnegan says don't, the SHRM mistakes article says do. Share the themes, not the exact wording.

What are the best stay interview questions?

The best stay interview questions are open-ended, about the employee's own experience, and tied to things a manager can influence. Here are 18, grouped by theme. You do not need all of them in one sitting.

What keeps them here

1. What do you look forward to most when you start your workday?
2. What are you learning here, and what would you like to learn?
3. If you were describing this job to a friend, what would you say is the best part?
4. Which colleagues or teams make your work easier or more enjoyable?

What might pull them away

5. What, if anything, would make you think about leaving?
6. Have you ever thought about leaving? What was happening at the time?
7. When was the last time you seriously considered another offer, and what made you stay?

The work itself

8. What part of your job would you happily never do again?
9. Where do you feel your skills are underused?
10. What gets in the way of doing your best work?
11. How manageable is your workload and schedule right now?

Growth and future

12. Where would you like to be in two years, and how can this job help you get there?
13. What is one skill or project you'd like to take on in the next six months?
14. Do you see a path forward here? If not, what's missing?

The manager relationship

15. What do I do that helps you most?
16. What should I start, stop or keep doing as your manager?
17. How do you like to receive recognition and feedback?
18. What is one thing I could change this month that would make your job better?

Questions 12 to 14 often surface promotion frustration in organizations with flat structures. If the honest answer is that no title change is coming, have alternatives ready, such as the options in this piece on career growth without a promotion.

How should you record and act on stay interview answers?

Record each conversation in a short, consistent format, turn it into a one-page stay plan with owners and dates, and roll up the themes for HR without exposing individual comments.

A practical record has five fields:

• Stay reasons: the two or three things the employee values most, in their words.
• Risk factors: anything that could pull them away, with how urgent it sounds.
• Actions: what the manager will do, what the employee will do, and the date for each.
• Out of the manager's control: issues to escalate, such as pay bands or policy.
• Next check-in date.

Store notes where only the manager, the employee and HR can see them, and tell the employee who will read them. Never share an individual's comments with peers.

At the HR level, code the themes (pay, workload, schedule, growth, manager, tools) and count how often each appears by team. Combine those counts with tenure and quit data to see where risk concentrates; this guide to using HR analytics to improve retention shows how. Then choose fixes that the evidence supports rather than whatever is fashionable, an approach laid out in evidence-based staff retention.

Common mistakes to avoid

Most failed stay interview programs fail on follow-through, not on the questions. Watch for these:

• Handing it to HR. The manager owns the relationship and most of the fixes.
• Waiting for warning signs. Holding a stay interview only after someone seems disengaged turns it into damage control. Start with everyone.
• Interrogating. Loaded questions make people defensive. Ask fewer, listen longer.
• Making promises you can't keep. "I'll look into a raise" heard as "you're getting a raise" does more harm than not asking.
• Doing it once. A single round creates expectations. Repeat at least once a year, and after major changes such as a reorganization.
• Using it as a counteroffer meeting. If someone has already resigned, that is a different conversation; see how HR should respond when an employee threatens to quit.

Stay interviews also have limits. They will not fix pay well below market, a toxic culture or a dead-end role, though they tell you the truth faster.

FAQ

How often should you hold stay interviews?

Once a year is a reasonable minimum for every employee, with extra conversations for new hires around their first few months and for anyone affected by a major change. The SHRM excerpt does not set a fixed cadence, so choose one you can sustain.

Should stay interviews be anonymous?

No. A stay interview depends on the manager knowing who said what so they can act on it for that person. If your culture is not yet safe enough for honest one-on-one feedback, run an anonymous survey first, fix the obvious problems, and introduce stay interviews once people see that feedback leads to action rather than consequences.

Can you hold a stay interview with a new hire?

Yes, and it is often worth it. Early conversations catch mismatches between what was promised in recruiting and what the job is really like. Ask what has surprised them and who has helped most.

What if an employee says the only thing that would help is more money?

Thank them, ask what a fair number looks like and how they arrived at it, and be honest about the process and timing. Then ask what else matters. Escalate the compensation question to HR, give a date for an answer, and keep that commitment even if the answer is no.

What to do next

1. Pick five to seven questions from the list above and write a one-paragraph opening script for your managers.
2. Start the cascade at the top: have your senior leader hold stay interviews with their direct reports this quarter.
3. Create a one-page stay plan template with the five fields above and agree where notes are stored.
4. After the first round, code the themes by team and compare them with your quit data to decide where to invest first.

Sources

• SHRM: How to Conduct Stay Interviews, Core Features and Advantages (Richard P. Finnegan)
• SHRM: What Companies Get Wrong When Conducting Stay Interviews
• Gallup: Employee Turnover Is Preventable but Often Ignored
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey news release
• Mitchell, Holtom, Lee, Sablynski and Erez (2001), Why People Stay: Using Job Embeddedness to Predict Voluntary Turnover, Academy of Management Journal

Last reviewed: October 2026.