How often should stay interviews happen?

Once or twice a year per person. Some teams also hold one around the first anniversary.

Who should conduct a stay interview?

Usually the direct manager, since they can act on what they hear. HR can run them where trust in the manager is low.

HR glossary

Stay interview

A stay interview is a conversation with a current employee about what keeps them at the company and what might make them leave.

A stay interview is a one-on-one conversation with someone you want to keep, held while they still work for you. It’s the exit interview done early enough to matter.

Ask simple questions and listen. What do you look forward to at work? What would make you leave? What would you change about your job if you could? Managers usually run them, and they only help if the manager follows up on at least one thing they heard.

What the research says

Most people leave for reasons an employer could have done something about. In Work Institute’s 2025 Retention Report, preventable departures made up 76.3% of exits in 2024¹. The largest were career misalignment at 18.9%, work-life balance at 12.0% and management at 9.7%, a six-year high for management¹.

A stay interview asks about those same things while the person still works for you. The report also notes that many organizations find stay interviews run by someone outside the company better at surfacing career concerns¹.

Shuffl · HR by the numbers

Share of 2024 exits that were preventable

Source: Work Institute, 2025¹Download PNG

Questions to ask

Richard Finnegan, writing for SHRM, recommends five questions, asked the same way every time so managers get better at them². He also suggests the manager listen for most of the conversation and take notes.

What do you look forward to each day when you commute to work?
What are you learning here, and what do you want to learn?
Why do you stay here?
When is the last time you thought about leaving us, and what prompted it?
What can I do to make your job better for you?

An example

A team lead at a 300-person customer contact center holds stay interviews with her 12 agents over two weeks, 30 minutes each. Four of them bring up the same thing: they want to move into quality assurance or training but don’t know how.

She writes down the one thing she’ll do for each person and shares the pattern with HR. HR posts the next two QA openings internally first and runs a lunch session on how to apply. Three months later she follows up with each agent on what she promised.

Common questions

How often should stay interviews happen?: Once or twice a year per person. Some teams also hold one around the first anniversary.
Who should conduct a stay interview?: Usually the direct manager, since they can act on what they hear. HR can run them where trust in the manager is low.

Sources

Read on September 25, 2026. Numbers change as new studies come out, so check the source before you quote it.

Work Institute, 2025 Retention Report: Employee Retention Truths in Today’s Workplace, 2025. Based on 123,297 exit interviews Work Institute conducted from 2019 to 2024 (14,215 in 2024) with employees of over 175 US companies, over 90% collected after the employee left and by Work Institute as a third party. Leader figures come from a survey of 88 HR and operational leaders, December 1, 2024 to January 15, 2025.
SHRM, How to Conduct Stay Interviews: 5 Key Questions, November 2023. Article by Richard P. Finnegan, excerpted from his book The Power of Stay Interviews for Engagement and Retention, second edition (2018). Practitioner guidance, not a survey.