Setting the Scene
A Langley manufacturer loses two project managers, each earning $110,000, within a quarter. At Mercer's 2026 replacement range of 20–150% of salary, that departure costs anywhere from $44,000 to $330,000, and realistically well past $150,000 once recruitment, ramp-up, and lost momentum are counted. In the exit interviews, both are candid, even warm. And every reason they give was true months ago. The information arrived exactly when it was useless.
The annual survey didn't catch it either. It gave the department a 3.8 out of 5: a temperature, not a name.
What Is a Stay Interview?
A stay interview is a structured conversation with someone you want to keep, held while they're still engaged. Give it real time — 30 to 60 minutes and sometimes more; what matters is protected, unhurried attention, not a fixed length. Not a survey. Not a performance review.
If you take one tool from this article, take this question, asked privately, by someone the person trusts:
"On a scale where 1 is 'actively looking' and 10 is 'not going anywhere', where are you today? And what would move you up one point?"
The first half gives you a number you can revisit next quarter. The second half turns a feeling into a specific, usually small, action.
The name is flexible. For someone who tenses up at anything formal, "let's grab a coffee and talk" will surface more than "I've booked your stay interview." Same conversation, same questions, softer frame. What can't flex is the intent: protected time, honest listening, and something done with what you hear.
Stay Interview vs Exit Interview
An exit interview tells you why someone left, once nothing can change it. A stay interview tells you why someone stays, while you can still strengthen the reasons and remove the frictions. Same questions. Opposite timing. Entirely different value.
What Leaders Are Navigating
- Turnover you didn't see coming. Resignations that feel avoidable in hindsight.
- A score, not a story. Survey averages that never name who's at risk, or why.
- Untested "good relationships." Managers close to their teams who've never asked the direct question.
- The fear of asking. Worry that "what would make you leave?" plants the idea.
That last fear stops most organizations from starting, so name it directly: asking doesn't create flight risk. Unspoken frustration does. People rarely leave over one dramatic issue. They leave when small, unvoiced frictions quietly outweigh the reasons to stay, and nobody asked in time. The real risk is the manager who learns what was wrong from a resignation letter.
What Questions Should You Ask?
Six to eight questions, asked with genuine curiosity, beat any long checklist. Move from what's working toward what could change:
What keeps you here. What do you look forward to on a good day? What would make you turn down an outside offer tomorrow?
What's wearing on you. What frustrates you often enough that it wears on you? If you could change one thing about your role or team, what would it be?
Growth and the future. Where do you want to grow next, and do you see a path to it here? What have you stopped learning?
Recognition and support. When did you last feel truly recognized? What do you need from me that you're not getting?
The joining experience. How did hiring, onboarding, and orientation actually go? What would have helped you get up to speed sooner? What surprised you, for better or worse, against what the process led you to expect?
The set flexes with tenure. For newer hires, lead with the joining experience — while it's fresh and while you can still fix it for the next person. For longer-tenured people, weight growth, recognition, and what's wearing on them.
When Should You Run One?
Run a stay interview now if any of these are true: voluntary turnover is trending above the ~12% Canadian rate (Mercer, 2026); the role is critical or hard to refill; the person was recently promoted, or passed over; they're named in your succession plan; or visible change is coming.
Beyond those triggers, the strongest programs run on a tenure rhythm, so the conversations happen before anyone is at risk. Useful anchor points: around the first month and again near 90 days, at the middle and the end of a probation period, at the one-year mark, and every year or two after that. Early on, keep it light — closer to a settling-in check-in than a full "what would make you leave?" — and use it to ask how hiring and onboarding actually went, while the memory is fresh. The milestones catch drift early; the triggers catch the people you can't afford to lose.
A couple of cautions. If a restructuring that will change the answers lands next month, ask after it, not before. And if a team is small and its leader already talks with everyone every week, formalizing may add little.
Who asks is an "it depends." Manager-led works in most organizations; they know the person and the work. But if trust in the manager is low, if the manager is new, or if compensation is likely the issue, HR or a skip-level leader gets more candour. Safety produces honesty; org charts don't.
One Approach We Push Back On
Some organizations fold stay questions into the engagement survey or the annual review. We advise against both. The survey aggregates; it can't tell you this person's price of staying. And the review contaminates; nobody answers "what would make you leave?" honestly in the meeting that sets their rating.
The stay interview only works as its own conversation, with its own name, booked with a clear frame: "Not a review. Time set aside for what keeps you here and what we could do better."
Aurora's Perspective
A stay interview is not a substitute for everyday contact. It works best inside a wider habit of staying in touch, on-site and remote alike, and it's where you catch what the day-to-day misses. Most retention efforts, though, are annual events reacting to last year's departures. We work differently. We train managers to hold these conversations themselves — from the questions to the framing to the follow-through — so the capability stays in your organization after we're gone.
The mechanism is simple, and we call it the Stay Cycle: conversation earns candour, candour enables a specific commitment, the kept commitment becomes visible action, and visible action is what retains — and what earns the next honest conversation. Because the pattern we see most in BC isn't managers who don't care. It's managers who found out what was wrong exactly one conversation too late.
Key Actions
- Start where a departure hurts most. Highest-impact roles first: biggest loss, hardest to refill.
- Use the same short question set every time. Consistency is what surfaces patterns. Three people naming the same friction is a signal no survey gives you.
- Listen, note, don't solve in the room. Understanding first; fixing later.
- Sort what you hear: fix now / fix later / can't change — and say which is which. Honesty about the third bucket buys credibility for the first.
- Close the loop within two weeks. Acting on even one or two things is what turns a conversation into retention. Asking and doing nothing does more harm than not asking.
- Track your retention rate before and after. Retention rate = (employees who stayed the whole period ÷ employees at the start of the period) × 100, counting only people present at both ends. Repeat the conversations twice a year for key roles — a rhythm, not an event.
This Insight is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For situation-specific guidance, consult qualified legal counsel.
Worried About Losing Good People?
A stay-interview program is one of the fastest, lowest-cost ways to protect the team you already have. We'll build the question set and train your managers to run it. Then it's yours.
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