{"id":101,"date":"2026-08-22T22:35:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T22:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8080\/smallhrtools\/blog\/?p=68"},"modified":"2026-08-25T20:50:32","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T20:50:32","slug":"stay-interview-questions-script","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smallhrtools.com\/blog\/stay-interview-questions-script\/","title":{"rendered":"Stay Interviews: The 5 Questions That Predict Resignations (With Script)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Short answer:<\/strong> a stay interview is a 30-minute, one-on-one conversation with a current<\/em> employee about why they stay and what would make them leave – held before<\/strong> anything is wrong. It is the cheapest retention intervention that actually works, because it collects the exit-interview information while you can still act on it. Below: the five questions that carry the conversation, the exact script, who to start with, and the follow-through rules that separate a useful program from a trust-destroying one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exit interviews are autopsies. Stay interviews are check-ups.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By the time an exit interview happens, the decision is months old, the new offer is signed, and the feedback is sanded down to politeness (“better opportunity, nothing personal”). You’re documenting a loss you already took – and at SHRM’s 50-200%-of-salary cost per departure<\/a>, it’s an expensive way to learn things late.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A stay interview inverts the timing. Research on why people quit consistently shows the drivers are knowable months in advance – stalled growth, manager friction, workload creep, pay drift below market. Every one of those is visible in a stay interview and invisible in a dashboard. Your retention rate<\/a> tells you how much<\/em> is leaking; stay interviews tell you where<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The five questions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Use them in this order – they escalate from safe to specific:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. “What do you look forward to when you come to work?”<\/strong> Opens positive, lowers guard, and maps what to protect<\/em>. If the answer is thin or entirely social (“the people”), note it – engagement resting on colleagues alone evaporates when one of them leaves.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. “What are you learning here – and what do you want to learn that you aren’t?”<\/strong> Growth stagnation is the most common resignation driver for your best performers, and the earliest to appear. A specific answer is a gift: it’s a retention lever that usually costs a project assignment, not a raise. (If the same gap recurs across people, that’s a skill-gap analysis<\/a> finding, not an individual one.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. “When was the last time you thought about leaving? What prompted it?”<\/strong> The spine of the interview. Asked plainly and calmly, almost everyone answers honestly – everyone has had the thought, and pretending otherwise kills the conversation’s credibility. The trigger<\/em> they name (a denied request, a chaotic quarter, a recruiter ping after a bad week) is the single most predictive data point you’ll collect.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. “What would make your job better tomorrow?”<\/strong> Deliberately small-scale. You’re fishing for the removable irritants – approval bottlenecks, meeting load, tooling friction – that compound into “I’m done” over a year. These are also the fixes you can deliver within a week, which is what proves the interview wasn’t theatre.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. “What might tempt you to leave – and what would make you stay if that offer arrived?”<\/strong> The forward-looking close. It surfaces the comparison they’re already running (market pay? title? remote flexibility?) and hands you the counter-offer before<\/em> there’s an offer to counter. Pay answers deserve a straight response: if you can’t match market, say what you can do and when – evasion here is remembered.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    The script around the questions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    Opening (verbatim, adjust to taste):<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    “This isn’t a performance review and nothing here goes in one. I want to understand what keeps you here and what would push you out – while I can still do something about it. I’ll take notes for myself, I’ll tell you what I can act on and what I can’t, and I’ll follow up within two weeks.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

    Rules for the interviewer:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n