Short answer
A stay interview is a structured one-to-one with a current employee about what keeps them, what frustrates them, and what would make them start looking. It is the inverse of an exit interview: an exit interview is an autopsy, a stay interview is a check-up, and only one of them can change the outcome. Done consistently and acted on, it is among the cheapest retention tools available.
Written by
Subhan Khan, Founder
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Retention
Exit interviews answer one question: "Why did you leave?" By the time you ask it, the answer no longer helps you. A stay interview flips the timing — it's a structured, one-on-one conversation with a current employee about what keeps them here, what frustrates them, and what would make them start looking. Done well, it's the cheapest retention tool a company has.
Stay Interview vs Exit Interview
An exit interview is an autopsy; a stay interview is a check-up. Exit interviews collect honest feedback you can only apply to the next employee. Stay interviews collect the same honesty while there's still time to act on it — before the recruiter's message gets answered, before the counter-offer conversation, before the two-week notice.
HRMZY's Retention AI scores resignation risk weekly and writes the stay-interview script for you — see Retention AI
What a Stay Interview Is Not
It is not a performance review — nothing about the employee's output is being evaluated. It is not a salary negotiation, although compensation may come up. And it is not a casual coffee chat: it has a structure, it produces notes, and those notes turn into actions. Mixing it with a performance conversation is the fastest way to get guarded, useless answers.
The Questions That Actually Work
Good stay interviews use open questions about the employee's experience, not the company's programs. The classics: What do you look forward to when you come to work? What are you learning here — and what do you want to learn? When was the last time you thought about leaving, and what prompted it? What would tempt you away? If you could change one thing about your job, what would it be? The last-time-you-thought-about-leaving question does the heaviest lifting — almost everyone has an honest answer, and it points directly at the risk factor.
Who Should Run Them — and How Often
The direct manager, not HR. The conversation works because it strengthens the manager–employee relationship; outsourcing it to HR signals process rather than genuine interest. A practical cadence is once or twice a year per employee, plus a triggered interview whenever something changes — a passed-over promotion, a team reorganisation, a key teammate resigning, or a visible dip in engagement.
The Hard Part: Knowing Who to Talk to First
In a 20-person company you can interview everyone. In a 200-person company you can't — and the people most at risk are rarely the ones who look loudest about it. This is where retention analytics earn their keep. HRMZY's Retention AI scores every employee's resignation risk weekly from signals already in your HR data — attendance shifts, leave patterns, workload spikes, time since last raise or promotion — and flags the conversations worth having now. It then drafts a personalised stay-interview script for the manager, built from that employee's actual context.
Acting on What You Hear
The interview is the easy half. Retention comes from what happens in the two weeks after: the workload that gets rebalanced, the growth conversation that gets scheduled, the process frustration that gets fixed. Track every commitment made in a stay interview the way you'd track any other task — visibly, with an owner and a date. An interview whose findings go nowhere is worse than no interview: it teaches people that honesty changes nothing.
Conclusion
Stay interviews work because they move the retention conversation from after the decision to before it. Start small: pick the five people whose resignation would hurt most, put 45 minutes with each on the calendar this month, and ask the questions above. And if you want the data to tell you who those five people should be, HRMZY's Retention AI is already watching the signals — quietly, every week.