The Interview You Are Probably Not Doing

Most organizations invest heavily in exit interviews and almost nothing in their opposite. That is backward. By the time someone is leaving, the useful window has closed. A stay interview flips the timing: a short, structured conversation with your valued people while they are still engaged, designed to surface what would keep them and what might push them away.

What a Stay Interview Actually Is

It is not a performance review and it is not a survey. It is a candid, low-stakes conversation, usually manager to team member, focused on their experience and their future. The goal is to listen, not to defend.

A few questions that open real dialogue:

What makes a good day at work for you here?
What would make you consider leaving?
What are you learning, and what do you want to learn next?
If you could change one thing about your role, what would it be?
Do you feel your work is recognized?

Why They Work

Stay interviews do two things at once. They give you early, specific intelligence about retention risk, and the conversation itself is retention. Being asked, genuinely, signals that someone matters. People stay where they feel seen.

Running Them Without Making It Weird

Train managers to listen, not fix. The instinct to solve on the spot kills candor. The first job is to understand.
Do them on a cadence, not just when someone seems restless. Twice a year is a reasonable rhythm for key roles.
Close the loop. Nothing poisons trust faster than asking and then doing nothing. Even a small visible response proves it was not theater.

Where ImpactCare Helps

Building a stay-interview program that managers will actually run, and that produces action rather than a stack of notes, is the kind of practical retention work we partner with health systems on. If your best people are quietly at risk, let us help you find out before the exit interview.