Do Stay Interviews Work? What the Evidence Says

Evidence grade: Insufficient. No study with a credible design has tested the question. This grade describes the published evidence. It is not a prediction about your workforce and not a result RetainScore has produced.

Widely recommended, rarely tested

A stay interview asks a current employee what would make them leave and what keeps them here, while there is still time to act on the answer. The logic is sound and the practice is cheap. Neither of those is evidence.

We went looking for a controlled evaluation of stay interviews as a retention intervention and did not find one. What exists is practitioner advocacy, plus small single-site studies in healthcare settings where the sample is a few dozen people at one employer and there is no comparison group. That literature can tell you people found the conversation worthwhile. It cannot tell you whether turnover moved, because it does not measure turnover against a counterfactual.

This page will change when that changes. Right now insufficient is the accurate word, and it is a different word from ineffective.

The honest argument for doing them anyway

The real case for stay interviews is not direct evidence that they work. It is the documented failure of the alternative.

The exit interview, the instrument stay interviews are meant to replace, has two failure modes on the record. Departing employees systematically manage the conversation: in the case study by Robyn Johns at the University of Technology Sydney, "all of the employees interviewed essentially followed the general principle of making sure that they didn't burn any bridges behind them." And organizations rarely act on what they collect, with "actual changes in organisational policies and/or work procedures as a direct result of the information obtained" reported as negligible. Johns concluded that "despite the accolades awarded to exit interviews they may not be as effective in practice as we have been lead to believe."

A stay interview removes the first of those problems by construction. Someone who is staying has less reason to protect a reference and more reason to want the answer acted on. That is a genuine structural advantage, and it is the strongest thing that can honestly be said for the practice.

It does nothing about the second problem. A stay interview whose findings never reach a decision maker fails in exactly the way the exit interview failed, one step earlier in the timeline.

What determines whether it is worth your time

• Who asks. If the person asking is the reason someone is thinking about leaving, the answer is worth nothing. The most common single driver in the retention literature is the direct manager, which makes the direct manager the wrong interviewer at least some of the time.
• Whether anything can change. Asking what would keep someone, and then changing nothing, is worse than not asking. You have converted a private doubt into a documented, ignored request.
• Whether it is a conversation or a form. The claimed advantage is candor. A questionnaire routed through HR gives back the same managed answers an exit interview does.

What to be skeptical of

Be skeptical of any stay interview program sold with a retention figure attached. There is no study that supports one. A vendor quoting a percentage is quoting a customer's before-and-after, which is not a measurement of the intervention: it does not separate the stay interview from everything else that changed in the same period, including the labor market.

Work through the retention diagnostic to see which factors the research finds predictive before you decide what to ask about, or read the companion grade on whether exit interviews work.