25 Stay Interview QuestionsThat surface flight risk while you can still act
By the time someone books an exit interview, the decision is weeks old and the apartment lease in the new city is probably signed. A stay interview asks the same questions while the answer still changes something. Here are 25 of them, what each one is actually testing, and the follow-through rule that separates a useful conversation from a wasted half hour.
Same questions. Completely different value.
In June 2026, 3.23 million Americans quit their jobs, a quits rate of 2.0 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS report. That is roughly one in fifty employed people walking out the door in a single month. Almost none of them told their manager what was wrong first, and almost all of them told an exit interviewer afterward.
The Work Institute has spent years arguing in its annual retention report that the large majority of turnover is preventable by the employer. I believe that, with one caveat: preventable only if you hear about the problem while it is still a problem and not yet a decision. That is the entire case for stay interviews.
This guide is for the manager or HR lead who wants to run these properly. If you also want the other side of the loop, our exit interview questions guide covers what to ask once someone has already resigned, and the onboarding checklist covers the first 90 days, where a surprising share of eventual turnover is actually created.
The basics
What a stay interview is, and what it is not
A stay interview is a short, scheduled, one-on-one conversation with someone who is currently employed and not currently leaving. The manager asks a fixed set of questions about what keeps the person here and what might pull them away. Thirty minutes. No rating attached. No form that goes to HR with a score on it.
It is not a performance review. It is not a one-on-one, which tends to be about this week. It is not an engagement survey, which gives you a number without a name attached to it. The whole point is that you know exactly who said what, and you can do something specific for that person on Monday.
The distinction from an exit interview matters more than any question wording. One tells you why the last person left. The other tells you why the next one might.
Ownership and timing
The direct manager runs it. HR owns the system.
There is a recurring argument in HR teams about whether stay interviews should be run by a neutral third party. My view is that neutrality is the wrong goal here. Almost everything an employee will raise in one of these conversations sits inside their manager's control: what they work on, who they work with, whether their work is visible, and whether they get the next interesting project. Gallup's workplace research has long put the manager at the center of team engagement variance. Routing the conversation around that person to make it feel safer also routes it away from the one who can fix anything.
What HR should own is the machinery: the question set, the cadence, the reminder, the aggregate themes across teams, and the awkward follow-up when a manager has quietly skipped three cycles in a row. Managers who have never done this need practice first, which is a natural extension of hiring manager training.
There is one exception. If the employee has an open complaint about their manager, someone else runs it. That is not a stay interview problem, that is an employee relations problem wearing a different hat.
Day 90 of a new hire
Onboarding regret peaks here
Within 30 days of a manager change
The single biggest turnover trigger
Two weeks after a promotion cycle
The people passed over are deciding
Every six months otherwise
Quarterly for hard-to-backfill roles
Structure
How to structure the 30 minutes
You will not use all 25 questions in one sitting. Pick five or six, one from each group, and let the conversation go where it wants. The structure below exists so that you do not spend 28 minutes on pleasantries and then rush the part that matters.
Open by saying out loud what this is: not a review, not going in your file, and here is what I plan to do with what you tell me. That sentence is worth more than any clever question. The research on structured conversations in hiring, summarised well by Google in re:Work's manager guides, applies here too. Consistency across people is what turns individual anecdotes into something you can act on. The same logic drives our structured interviews guide.
A 30-minute stay interview, timeboxed
Set the frame
0-4 minState the purpose. Confirm it is not a review.
The work itself
4-12 minWhat energizes them, what drains them.
Growth
12-20 minWhere they think they are heading.
Friction
20-26 minWhat they would change tomorrow.
Commit
26-30 minOne action, one owner, one date.
Group 1
Open the conversation
The first four minutes decide whether you get the real answers or the polite ones. Do not start with a question about problems. Start with something the person can answer without calculating the political cost.
What made you say yes to this job in the first place?
If the reason no longer exists, you have found the gap before they have.
What does a genuinely good week here look like for you?
You are collecting their definition of a good job, not yours.
What are you looking forward to in the next few months?
An empty answer from someone who used to have plans is the loudest signal in this list.
If you took a call from a recruiter tomorrow, what would make you listen?
Most people answer this honestly because it is hypothetical. Note the first thing they name.
Group 2
The work itself
People rarely quit an entire job. They quit a specific part of it that has quietly grown to fill their week. These questions find that part.
Which part of your work would you happily do more of?
This is your reassignment lever, and it usually costs nothing.
Which part drains you, even when it goes well?
The qualifier matters. Draining work that succeeds still burns people out.
What are you spending time on that you think nobody values?
Invisible work is a top cause of quiet resentment on small teams.
When did you last feel genuinely proud of something you shipped here?
If the answer is more than six months old, ask why the gap.
Is your workload sustainable at the current level for another year?
The word year forces honesty. Ask this quarter and everyone says yes.
Group 3
Growth and direction
The most common reason strong people leave a good team is that they cannot see the next step. Not money. Direction. This group is where you find out whether your view of their path matches theirs.
What do you want to be good at two years from now?
If your team cannot offer that, say so early and help them get there anyway.
What skill are you building right now, and is it happening at work or outside it?
Growth happening entirely on evenings and weekends is a slow-motion resignation.
Is there a project on the roadmap you want and have not been given?
Ask this and be ready to act. It is the easiest promise to keep and the worst one to break.
Who here do you learn the most from?
You are mapping the informal mentors. When one leaves, everyone attached to them wobbles.
What would need to be true for you to still be here in three years?
The answer is a specific, testable condition. Write it down word for word.
Group 4
Friction and frustration
This is the section managers skip because it feels like an invitation to complain. Skip it and the whole exercise becomes theatre. Ask it, take notes visibly, and do not defend anything in the room.
What is the most frustrating part of getting your job done here?
Usually a process or a dependency, not a person. Both are fixable.
What do we do that you would stop tomorrow if it were your call?
Meetings, approvals, and reporting rituals dominate the answers.
Where do you feel blocked by someone outside the team?
Cross-team friction is invisible in every engagement survey I have seen.
What have you raised before that never went anywhere?
This is the trust audit. A long answer here means the last few conversations were wasted.
Is there anything about how you are paid that does not feel right to you?
Ask directly. Pay resentment left unspoken hardens into a resignation letter.
What would you warn a friend about before they joined this team?
The single most productive question on this list. It gives permission to be blunt.
Group 5
The manager, recognition, and the close
Asking someone to critique you to your face has an obvious flaw, and most people will soften it. Ask anyway. The pattern across a whole team is more reliable than any single answer.
What should I do more of as your manager?
Easier to answer than its opposite, and it still surfaces the gap.
What do I do that gets in your way?
Expect a soft answer. Count the pauses, not the words.
When you do good work, does the right person notice?
Recognition failures are almost always a routing problem, not a caring problem.
Of everything we have discussed, what matters most to you?
This is how you pick the one thing to act on instead of promising five.
What is one thing I can change in the next 30 days?
Close on this every time. It converts a conversation into a commitment.
Retention starts with who you hire
Prepzo helps hiring teams run structured interviews, score candidates against the actual job, and keep a clean record of why every decision was made.
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How to read the answers you get
The honest answer about flight risk is that the loudest signal is usually the absence of one. People who are checking out get easier to manage, not harder. They stop arguing in meetings. They stop sending the long message about why the process is broken. Managers routinely read that as a person who has finally settled in.
Compare each answer against what that person said six months ago, not against what a textbook says a happy employee sounds like. The delta is the data.
Flight risk signals
- Talks about the team in the past tense
- Cannot name anything they are looking forward to
- Stops raising problems they used to raise
- Vague, agreeable answers where they used to be blunt
- Growth answer is about a title, not the work
- Mentions a friend who recently left and landed well
Still invested
- Names a specific project they want next
- Complains about something fixable and concrete
- Asks about the team roadmap beyond this quarter
- Pushes back on your answer during the session
- Has an opinion about who should be hired next
- Brings up a skill they want to build here
The part everyone skips
The 30-day rule
Here is the uncomfortable part. A stay interview with no follow-up is worse than no stay interview at all. You have now given someone a formal opportunity to state what is wrong, and then confirmed with your silence that stating it changes nothing. That is a stronger push toward the door than never asking.
So close every session the same way: one change, one owner, one date, inside 30 days. Not five changes. One. It can be small. Take a recurring meeting off their calendar. Give them the project they asked for. Introduce them to the person they said they wanted to learn from. Fix the approval step that costs them two days a month.
If the ask is something you cannot do, say that in the room rather than in a follow-up message a week later. "I cannot move your title this cycle, here is what I can do instead" keeps the trust. Going quiet does not.
Track completion of those commitments the way you track any other operational metric. If you already report on recruiting KPIs, add one line: percentage of stay interview actions closed within 30 days. It will be embarrassing the first quarter. That is the point.
Zooming out
What to do with 40 conversations
Individual sessions fix individual problems. The pattern across a whole department fixes the system. Once a quarter, strip the names out and sort the answers into four buckets: work design, growth, pay and levelling, and management quality. Count them. The biggest bucket is your retention project for the next quarter, and it is rarely the one leadership assumed.
Pay complaints that cluster in one job family usually mean a banding problem rather than a market problem, which is a different fix. Our guides on salary banding and building a compensation philosophy cover that. Growth complaints that cluster in mid-level roles usually mean you have no visible internal path, which is what an internal mobility program is for.
One more use for the aggregate. Everything people tell you about why they stay is raw material for your job postings and your careers page. It is more credible than anything a brand agency will write, because it came from people who already made the decision you are asking candidates to make. Feed it into your employer branding work.
Watch out
Five ways teams get this wrong
Running them only for people you think are at risk
Being selected for a special conversation is itself a message. Run them for everyone on a schedule, or the invitation becomes the story.
Defending the company in the room
The moment you explain why the frustrating thing is actually necessary, the honest answers stop. Take the note. Argue later, if at all.
Turning it into a satisfaction survey
Rating scales produce averages. You want sentences. If the output is a number between one and five, you have built a worse version of a tool you already own.
Promising what you cannot deliver
Managers under pressure over-commit in these conversations. One kept promise beats three hinted ones.
Letting the notes drift into performance decisions
Once that happens even once, word travels, and every future session produces careful, useless answers.
The math
Why the time cost is not really a cost
A manager with eight reports running two rounds a year spends eight hours on this annually. Eight hours. Replacing one mid-level employee costs a multiple of their salary once you count the vacancy period, the recruiting spend, the interview time across the panel, and the six months before the replacement is fully productive. Our breakdown of the cost of a bad hire runs the same arithmetic from the other direction.
One retained person pays for the entire program several times over. That is a rare thing in HR, where most initiatives are hard to tie to a number at all. Harvard Business Review's employee retention coverage and SHRM's how-to guides are both good places to pull benchmark figures if you need to make the case to a finance team.
The catch is that the return only shows up if managers do the follow-through. Without that, you have added eight hours of meetings and a small amount of resentment. With it, you have the cheapest retention lever available to a company of any size.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a stay interview?
A stay interview is a short structured conversation between a manager and an employee who is still on the team, designed to find out what keeps that person here and what might push them out. It is preventive. An exit interview is a post-mortem, run after the decision has already been made.
How long should a stay interview take?
Thirty minutes is the right length. Long enough to get past the polite answers, short enough that managers actually book them. If you schedule an hour, half of them get cancelled and rescheduled into oblivion.
Who should run stay interviews, HR or the direct manager?
The direct manager, in almost every case. The manager controls most of what the employee will raise: workload, project assignment, recognition, and growth. HR should own the cadence, the question set, and the aggregate reporting, but a stay interview run by a stranger from HR gets stranger-level answers.
How often should you run stay interviews?
Twice a year for most employees, quarterly for people in roles that are expensive to replace or hard to backfill. Also run one at the 90-day mark for every new hire and one within a month of any manager change, since both moments carry unusually high turnover risk.
What if an employee will not be honest?
Assume the first answer is the polite one and ask a follow-up. Silence helps more than another question. If someone genuinely will not open up after two or three attempts across different sessions, that guardedness is itself the finding, and it usually points at the relationship with the manager rather than at the employee.
Do stay interviews actually reduce turnover?
Only when something changes afterward. The conversation surfaces information, it does not retain anyone. Teams that commit to one concrete action within 30 days see the benefit. Teams that ask and then go quiet make the problem worse, because they have now confirmed for the employee that speaking up leads nowhere.
Should stay interview notes go in the employee file?
No. Keep them separate from performance documentation and say so at the start of the conversation. The moment people suspect their answers feed into a rating or a promotion decision, they start managing the transcript instead of telling you the truth.
Resources & Further Reading
Related Guides
- Exit Interview Questions That Get Honest Answers
The other half of the retention loop
- Employee Onboarding Checklist
Where a lot of eventual turnover is created
- How to Build an Internal Mobility Program
The fix for growth complaints that cluster
- Succession Planning for Growing Teams
What to do before a key person resigns
External Sources
- Bureau of Labor Statistics: JOLTS
Monthly quits levels and quits rate
- Work Institute: Retention Report
Annual analysis of why employees leave
- Gallup: Workplace Research
Manager impact on team engagement
- Harvard Business Review: Employee Retention
Research and case studies on turnover
