Exit interviews and stay interviews, done properly

Every resignation is a data point the company paid dearly for. Most companies collect it badly: a form sent on the last day, filled in politely, filed and never read. And almost no small company does the cheaper version, which is asking people why they stay before they decide to leave. This guide covers both.

Why exit interviews underperform

People leaving a job have little reason to be candid. They want a clean relieving letter, a good reference and no awkwardness in a small industry where they will meet their old manager again. So they say "better opportunity" and "personal reasons", which are true and useless.

Three changes fix most of this. Hold the interview in the middle of the notice period, not the last day, when the person is still engaged but has nothing left to negotiate. Have it conducted by someone other than the direct manager, typically HR or a founder the person did not report to. And make clear up front that the notes are aggregated, not attributed, and that nothing said will affect the full and final settlement or the reference.

What to ask in an exit interview

Keep it to 30 minutes and six questions, asked as a conversation rather than a form:

1. What made you start looking? Not what made you accept the offer; what made you open the job sites in the first place. The answer to this is the real reason.
2. What would have had to be different for you to stay?
3. How was your relationship with your manager? Ask it plainly; the answer is often the whole story.
4. Did you feel you were growing here? If not, when did that stop?
5. Is there anything about how the team or company works that you think leadership does not see?
6. Would you come back, and would you recommend us to a friend? Two yes answers from someone who is leaving tells you the exit is about opportunity; two no answers tells you it is about the company.

Record the answers the same day in a structured note: reason category (manager, growth, pay, workload, relocation, personal), whether the exit was regretted, and two or three verbatim lines. The categorisation is what makes the data useful six months later when someone asks why attrition rose; our HR metrics guide shows how it feeds the attrition split.

Share themes, never transcripts. If three people in a year name the same manager, that is a pattern worth a careful conversation. One person naming a manager is a data point worth noting and nothing more.

The stay interview

A stay interview is a one-to-one conversation with a current employee about what keeps them and what might push them out. It is not a performance review and not a 1:1 about work; it is explicitly about their relationship with the company. It is cheaper than an exit interview because the person is still here, and the information arrives while it can still be used.

Who should get one: everyone you would be sorry to lose, at least once a year, and anyone whose behaviour has changed in a way their manager has noticed. The manager usually conducts it, because the manager is the person who can act on most of what comes up. Where the manager is the problem, an HR-led version is a useful second channel.

Five questions that work:

1. What do you look forward to when you come to work, and what do you dread?
2. What have you learned here recently, and what would you like to learn next?
3. If you got a call from a recruiter tomorrow, what would make you take the conversation?
4. What is one thing that would make your job easier or better?
5. What can I do differently as your manager?

The third question is the one managers avoid and the one that matters. Asked honestly, it is received as care, not as suspicion. The fifth question only works if the manager is willing to hear the answer and change something.

Acting on what you hear

The point of both interviews is action within the manager's control, and most of what people say is within it. Growth concerns become a project assignment or a training budget. Workload concerns become a conversation about priorities. Recognition concerns are the cheapest of all to fix. Pay concerns need a framework answer, not an ad hoc raise; see pay bands and increments. Manager concerns need HR, and need it before the next exit interview repeats them.

Keep a simple register: who was interviewed, when, the one or two things raised, and what was done. Review it quarterly alongside the exit themes. When a stay interview item was raised, nothing was done, and the person then resigned, the register will show it, which is uncomfortable and exactly the point.

Two things to avoid

Do not turn a stay interview into a retention negotiation. If someone says they are being approached, the answer is to understand why the conversation is tempting, not to pre-emptively counter-offer. And do not treat the exit interview as the time to collect feedback about a resignation you were surprised by. If the resignation was a surprise, the failure happened months earlier, and the stay interview is the fix for next time.