Stay Interviews: Questions and How to Run Them

A stay interview is a structured conversation with someone who currently works for you about what keeps them and what might drive them away. It is the mirror image of the exit interview, and a far better tool, because it gathers the same insight while you can still do something with it. As retention pressure has risen, stay interviews have moved from a niche HR practice to a mainstream one, for the obvious reason that learning why your good people might leave before they leave is worth a great deal. This guide covers the questions and how to run them so the answers are honest.

Why stay interviews beat exit interviews

The exit interview is a post-mortem: useful, but the patient has already left. Whatever you learn helps the next person, not the one walking out. The stay interview gathers comparable insight (what works, what does not, what would change the calculus) from someone still here, while the information is actionable. If retention is the goal, the timing difference is everything. Smart companies run both and treat them as two halves of one feedback loop, the framing in retention strategies.

The questions

Keep them open and non-leading, focused on the person's real experience:

• What do you look forward to when you come to work?
• What would make you consider leaving?
• What would make you want to stay here long term?
• Do you feel your contributions are valued? What would make you feel more valued?
• What is frustrating you or getting in your way?
• If you could change one thing about your role or the company, what would it be?
• What are you learning here, and what do you want to learn next?

The point is not the checklist; it is what the answers reveal. One honest "I do not see where I go from here" is worth more than a page of neutral responses.

How to run them so people are honest

Three things determine whether you get truth or politeness. Separate them from performance reviews, so the employee is not managing an evaluation while answering. Listen far more than you talk, and resist the urge to defend or explain; the moment you get defensive, the honesty stops. And close the loop: act on what you can, and tell the person what you did. A stay interview that visibly changes nothing is worse than none, because it teaches people that candor is pointless. Usually the direct manager runs them, since most answers point at things the manager can influence, with HR providing the framework and cadence (once or twice a year, more for new hires and known flight risks).

Where stay interviews and surveys fit together

Stay interviews give you depth on individuals; engagement and onboarding surveys give you breadth across the company. The survey flags that something is wrong in a team or stage; the stay interview tells you what, for whom, and what to do. Run both and you have a retention signal that is both wide and deep. New hires especially benefit from an early version, a 30 or 90 day check-in, which catches the doubts that drive early turnover before they harden.

How Sakha helps

Sakha runs the structured pulse and milestone surveys that surround stay interviews, the breadth layer, automatically: scheduled check-ins with new hires and at key milestones, aggregated into a signal that tells you where to look. That tells managers which conversations to prioritize, so the deeper stay interview goes where it is most needed rather than everywhere or nowhere. The free-text responses surface the recurring themes (the frustrations, the growth gaps) that one-on-one conversations might miss across a whole team. Sakha does not replace the human stay-interview conversation, which should stay human, but it tells you when and with whom to have it, and it makes sure the survey half of the loop actually happens on schedule instead of being perpetually postponed.