Stay interview questions to ask while you can still act on the answer
A stay interview is a conversation between one person and their own manager, not a form. The twelve questions below are free to copy for that meeting. The buttons open the ten-question survey version instead, which is the fallback for when the manager is part of what needs saying.
- 12questions to ask
- About 30 minset aside for it
- One personand their own manager
- 10in the survey version
Twelve stay interview questions, and what a thin answer to each one tells you
One thing before you read them. If the resignation is already in, this conversation has nothing left to change and the exit interview questions are the ones that still work. Everything below assumes the person is staying, at least for now. Take two or three from each block rather than all twelve: that is how the published banks are meant to be used,[5] and a manager reading twelve questions off a page is running an interrogation.
What is worth keeping
Placed first on purpose. Asking what is working before asking what is broken gives the person something to protect, and gives you the list of things not to change in the next reorganisation.
- Think about a day here recently that went well. What made it a good day?A specific day gets you a specific answer. A general question about job satisfaction gets you a general one.
- Which part of your job would you protect if I had to take something off your plate?The answer names the part of the role you cannot quietly reassign. Several people naming the same part is a design finding.
- What do you have here that you would have to give up somewhere else?A short answer or a long silence is the one to write down. It means the person cannot name a reason to stay.
What is wearing thin
Three questions asked in the middle of the meeting, after there is something on the table worth keeping and before the part where you agree what to do.
- What part of your week do you dread?A dreaded Tuesday meeting is fixable this month. A dreaded Monday morning is about the job.
- What are you doing that somebody else should be doing?This surfaces work that arrived by accident, which is the kind a manager can actually move.
- What would another employer have to offer before you would take the call?A price comes out first because it is the easiest thing to name. The item is open and unhurried so the answer can carry what sits behind the number.
Where this is going
The conversation is deliberately held outside the performance review, so this block asks about a direction rather than a rating.[5]
- What do you want to be able to do a year from now that you cannot do today?An answer with a skill in it is cheap to act on. An answer with a title in it is a different conversation, and worth having.
- Who here has taught you something this year?A name is a good sign and tells you who to protect. No name at all is the answer to pay attention to.
- If nothing was in the way, what would you want your job to look like in two years?The gap between this answer and the job they have now is the size of the retention problem.
What I can change
The last block, because it is the one the meeting exists to produce. Every answer here is a candidate for the plan at the end.
- What is one thing I do that makes your job harder?Nobody answers this the first time it is asked. Ask it anyway, wait, and ask it again next year.
- What have you asked for before that never happened?The most useful question on the list, because it is checkable and because it names something you already promised.
- If we change one thing before we next talk, what should it be?This is the question that turns the meeting into a plan. Whatever the answer is, it goes on the plan with a date.
None of the twelve is a rating, because the answer worth having is a sentence you did not expect. The survey version below covers the same ground in ten items, and says what that swap costs.
The canonical five belong to somebody, and almost nobody says so. The five stay interview questions that most pages on this subject reprint are Richard P. Finnegan's authored set, published under his byline by SHRM.[3] They are worth reading at the source, and they are his. The twelve above are written for this page and go at different ground: what a person would give up elsewhere, what they asked for and never got, and what the manager does that makes the job harder.
When to have the conversation, and the one moment it is too late
The name is about timing. It is the same subject as the conversation people have on the way out, held while both of you can still do something with the answer.
| The moment | What you can still change | What it cannot reach |
|---|---|---|
| On the calendar, about once a year | All of it. Nothing has happened yet, so every answer is still in play and every promise is still cheap. | Urgency. Someone who is content gives a thin answer, and a thin answer is the price of asking on a schedule. |
| After something changed for them: a new manager, a promotion that went elsewhere, a team split up | The specific thing, while the person is still working out what it means to them. | A baseline. With nothing to compare it against you cannot tell a bad month from a bad job. |
| Once the resignation is in | Nothing on this list. The decision was made somewhere else, and probably a while ago. | This conversation at all. What is left is the account of why, which is a different set of questions. |
Put it on the calendar rather than waiting for a signal. Leaving a job is a steady monthly fact rather than an event: 3.1 million people in the United States quit voluntarily in July 2026, a rate of 1.9 percent.[1] A manager who waits until somebody looks unhappy has made the schedule depend on noticing.
The case for asking early is one number, and it comes with a caveat. Gallup reported in 2019 that 52 percent of people who left a job voluntarily said their manager or their organization could have done something to stop them.[2] Gallup published that figure with no sample size and no field dates, so it appears here once and carries no more weight than its own sentence.
How long, and how often. The sources that publish a duration disagree: 25 to 45 minutes in one glossary,[7] 30 in one university toolkit,[6] 30 to 45 in another guide.[8] Half an hour is enough for the questions if you stop talking. Someone still in their first weeks is a different conversation with different questions, and the induction feedback survey template asks those.
A year is a long time to hear nothing in between. That gap belongs to a different instrument: short pulse survey questions put to everyone, trended, with no meeting attached.
Who should ask, and the case where it should not be the manager
Nearly every published version puts the person's own manager in the chair, and the reason is practical: that is the one person who can act on an answer without asking permission first.
The method is a behaviour before it is a question list. The version SHRM publishes is mostly instructions to the person asking: do most of the listening, and keep going after the first answer.[3] That is the part no question list can hand over, and the part that decides whether the meeting was worth holding.
The argument against the manager is one sentence long. If the honest answer involves the manager, the manager will not hear it. The publisher whose stay and exit forms both rank on this subject names the condition plainly: where information comes more freely without a name attached, someone from HR should run the conversations and pool the results.[4] When that is your situation, take the name off the question and run an anonymous employee survey rather than dressing this one up as confidential.
What this conversation can never tell you is how the manager is doing. The manager is the one asking, so every answer is shaped by that before anybody speaks. A read on a named manager comes from the whole team at once, in a supervisor feedback survey.
The strongest argument against turning any of this into a questionnaire comes from a firm that sells it. One retention consultancy's entire product is stay interviews, and what it sells is human interviewers rather than a form, on the stated grounds that a person can follow an answer where a fixed set of responses cannot.[9] That is a company arguing against the cheaper version of its own market.
What to do with the answers: a stay plan of three things
This is the part almost nobody publishes, and it is the part that turns a question list into a method. One toolkit runs it properly, so the shape below follows theirs.[6]
Write it down in the room
Before the meeting ends, agree out loud what you both heard. A plan typed up afterwards is a plan the other person never saw and cannot hold you to.
Cap it at three, with a name and a date on each
The toolkit caps the plan at three initiatives and records shared responsibilities and a completion date against each.[6] Some of the three belong to the person and some to you, and an item with nobody's name on it is a note.
Say when you will both look at it again
The plan is revisited through the year rather than filed.[6] If the next time either of you opens it is at the next stay interview, you have taught somebody that answering changes nothing.
Send the questions ahead. Sharing them in advance is an option the same toolkit offers,[6] and it swaps surprise for preparation. In the invitation below, the parts in brackets are the only ones you have to write.
The survey version, and what it costs you
Ten questions, about three minutes, and it is second best. Here is when it is the right call anyway.
| What the conversation gives you | What the form gives you instead |
|---|---|
| A follow-up question, chosen by what the person just said | The ten questions you wrote before you knew anything |
| An agreement, made in front of the person it is about | A row you read on your own, later |
| One person at length, in the words they chose | Ratings you can count across a group |
| Somebody who knows they were heard | Somebody waiting to see whether anything happens |
Two situations make the form the right call. The first is the one the sources name: the manager is part of what needs saying, so the manager should not be in the room.[4] The second is arithmetic. Half an hour each, across forty people, is twenty hours of somebody's month, and a manager who cannot find that should send something honest rather than run nine hurried meetings and call it a programme.
What it is not is a read on a team. It is one person's form, about their own job, answered under their own name. When the question is which parts of the organization are losing people, with no names attached and enough answers to see a shape, that is an attrition pulse. That one is built to be counted; this one is built to be read.
One line at the top of the form does most of the work. Name the person who will read the answers, and say whether that person is the reader's own manager. The answers change with the reader.
All ten questions are already built. Open them in the editor, change any wording and send them today, or design a survey online from a blank page instead.
Questions people ask about stay interviews
What is a stay interview?
A conversation between someone who works for you and their own manager, about why they are still here and what would change that, held while there is still time to act on the answer. It has the same subject as the conversation people have on their way out and none of its finality, and it is not anonymous: one named person, one manager, one agreement at the end.
How long does a stay interview take?
How often should you run one?
Who should ask the questions?
The person's own manager, in almost every published version, because that is the one person who can act on the answer without asking permission. The exception is where the manager is part of what would have to be said; then it belongs to someone from HR, or to a form with no name attached.
Does a stay interview have to be anonymous?
It cannot be. One person is answering about their own job in front of somebody who knows exactly who they are. That is what makes an agreement possible at the end, and a few answers impossible at the start. If the answers you need are the impossible ones, the honest move is a different instrument, not a longer question list.
Methods and sources
What this template is based on
The timing, the cadence, the shortlist-from-a-bank practice and the three-item plan come from the published stay interview material and from labour turnover data.[1][4][5][6] The questions are written for this page.
Question licensing
No licensed instrument governs stay interview questions. The best known five are Richard P. Finnegan's authored set and are cited rather than reprinted.[3] Everything on this page is yours to copy, edit and translate.
Limits and disclosure
The Gallup figure is quoted as Gallup states it, with no sample size, field dates or method disclosed.[2] Durations and cadences disagree across sources and are attributed individually rather than averaged. One conversation is one person, every time: nothing here supports a statement about a team, a site or a base rate.
SuperSurvey makes the editor the survey version opens in. The twelve questions are free to use with or without it, and the page argues that most readers should use them without it.
References
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary, news release of 1 September 2026, reference month July 2026. bls.gov
- Gallup. "This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion." Gallup Workplace, 13 March 2019. gallup.com. Gallup states the figure without a sample size, field dates or method; it is quoted here as Gallup's own finding and nothing more.
- Finnegan, Richard P. "How to Conduct Stay Interviews: 5 Key Questions." SHRM. shrm.org
- The Employee Engagement Group. "Stay Interview and Exit Interview Questions." PDF hosted by Housing Partnership Network. housingpartnership.net
- University of Nebraska at Kearney, Human Resources. "Retention/Stay Conversation." PDF, 2021. unk.edu
- University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Human Resources. "Stay Interview Toolkit." intranet.med.wisc.edu
- BambooHR. "Stay Interviews." HR Glossary. bamboohr.com
- AIHR. "30 Best Stay Interview Questions To Ask Employees." aihr.com
- Work Institute. "Stay Interview Services to Improve Employee Retention." workinstitute.com
Book half an hour with the person you cannot afford to lose
Twelve questions to take into the room, free to copy. If you cannot get to everyone, the ten-question form covers the same ground in three minutes.
Open the survey version