Should You Introduce Stay Interviews?

Should You Introduce Stay Interviews? An Honest Assessment

An exit interview happens when someone has already decided to leave. The feedback is useful for the next person — but it's too late to help the one walking out the door. A stay interview flips that. You have it while someone is still there, still engaged, and still worth keeping.

Oxford Economics puts the average cost of replacing an employee earning over £25,000 at more than £30,000. Yet only 28% of organisations run stay interviews — the other 72% rely on exit interviews, gathering feedback at precisely the moment it can change nothing.

In this episode: when stay interviews are worth doing, when they're just another HR process adding noise, and what questions actually get useful answers.

• Stay interviews only work if done with a specific purpose. As a routine process, they risk becoming a tick-box exercise. Used deliberately — to understand why a high-turnover team is haemorrhaging people, or why a high-retention team is keeping them — they have real value.
• Most people won't tell the truth in a stay interview. Asking if someone is thinking of leaving rarely gets an honest answer. Focus instead on connection, purpose, career development, and alignment with the business direction.
• Running stay interviews and doing nothing with the data is worse than not running them. It signals that views don't matter. Only introduce the process if you're prepared to act on what you hear.
• The best questions focus on what makes someone stay, not what might push them out. Purpose, career path, and goal alignment surface the real drivers of retention — and give you something you can actually influence.
• Stay interviews work best when targeted, not universal. Interviewing everyone is rarely practical. A cross-section of demographics, tenure lengths, and roles gives more meaningful data with far less time.
• Who does the interview matters. Managers should ideally be having these conversations in one-to-ones. But if trust is the issue, an independent HR person will get more honest answers and can add depth on career development pathways.
• People often stay for reasons outside a business's control — proximity, school run timing, childcare flexibility. Knowing this stops you chasing insights that don't exist and helps you focus on what you can actually change.

• [00:01] What a stay interview is
• [01:57] Stay interviews vs existing HR processes
• [03:01] When stay interviews add real value
• [07:07] Will people actually tell the truth?
• [10:31] Questions to ask — and avoid
• [13:53] HR or manager: who runs it?
• [17:06] Forms vs face-to-face conversations
• [18:44] Why people stay — and what you can't control

Resources Mentioned

1. Oxford Economics — average cost of replacing an employee earning over £25,000 is more than £30,000 when factoring in recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity

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