Most companies conduct thorough interviews when evaluating candidates during the hiring process, and it’s estimated that 72 percent of organizations conduct some kind of exit interview.
But only a mere 28 percent of these companies conduct stay interviews.
Those who don’t are missing out on essential insights about how to make specific improvements on items such as:
- Employee satisfaction and engagement
- Company culture
- Long-term company growth
There’s a great deal of value in this type of interview. Companies that conduct these interviews gather vital details on how they can retain talent, connect with (and keep) great employees, and limit employee attrition. Here’s why you shouldn’t overlook this important tool.
The Stay Interview: What You Need to Know
Think of a stay interview as a customer retention strategy, only for your team. It allows you to fix issues before they cause turnover and serves as a proven strategy to discover what your employees want and need. In other words, it helps you proactively spot and solve workplace issues to ensure your employees want to stay.
What does this interview entail? It’s a structured discussion or conversation conducted by a leader or third party and held one-on-one with individual team members. The point of these interviews is to discover why employees continue to choose to stay employed with the business but also provide a platform to gather actionable insights about what employees find challenging or frustrating. These interviews discover, in great detail, what the company can do to encourage engagement and retention.
Stay interviews should be conducted at different points across the employee lifecycle, depending upon industry, employment type, and turnover statistics. Examples include 3 to 6 months after an employee joins the company, after 1 year of employment, and after several years of employment. This is because employees have different needs and concerns at different times. For example, after a few months, the interview may focus on the recruiting and onboarding process, while after a year or more, it may be geared toward discovering an employee’s thoughts on training, development, environment, and company culture.
Employee surveys are a great way to get a particular look at certain aspects of company culture and how your team feels about working for your business. But for companies looking to take an in-depth look at how to support and retain top talent, stay interviews provide an opportunity for follow-up questions, additional context, more personal responses, and better details that provide leadership with even more valuable information.
Stay interviews provide all kinds of benefits, including:
- Building employee engagement and fostering company loyalty
- Promoting teamwork, value of employees, and camaraderie
- Finding and addressing issues in the early stages
- Retaining top talent
- Determining the health of company culture
- Discovering individual employees’ needs and well-being
- Developing and refining recruiting, onboarding and training practices
Why Opt for a Stay Interview? And Why Now?
Focusing on employee retention and engagement through tools like stay interviews isn’t just good for morale—it’s also a sound business strategy. Employee turnover can be quite costly to your organization. By some estimates, replacing an employee can cost an average of around 50 to 60 percent of their annual earnings, but depending on their position and talent, the overall financial loss to the company can soar as high as 200 percent of their yearly earnings just to replace them.
In other words, if an employee earns $60,000 each year, the average cost to replace them, which includes seeking qualified candidates, conducting interviews, onboarding, training, and productivity lost to time adjusting to a new role, ranges between $30,000 and $45,000. And total financial losses to the company may climb to $120,000.
Here’s where the value of this interview becomes clear: After leaving a company, people often state that they wish they could have shared more feedback with their employer before they were at the point of leaving. While exit interviews provide a platform to discover issues after the fact, stay interviews help build trust and identify potential pain points before an employee makes the choice to leave. And when retention interviews (another name for stay interviews) are conducted with top talent, it may make all the difference in keeping high-performing employees on the team.
Stay interviews have never been more important than they are now. While talk of the “Great Resignation” made headlines in 2021, more employees are considering leaving their jobs in the next year now than they were several years ago.
In 2021, 40 percent of professionals reported that they were thinking about quitting their current job sometime in the next 12 months. However, in 2024, 46 percent of professionals–almost half–reported that they were thinking about quitting their jobs at some point in the coming year. What’s more, the job networking platform LinkedIn reported seeing a 14 percent rise in the average number of applicants for each posted job opening between the fall of 2023 and the spring of 2024.
The Power of Stay Interviews
Conducting this kind of interview is a great way to build trust, to ensure your team feels heard as individuals, and to discover and address any potential issues before they cause top talent to leave your company.
Here’s an example: Companies that have high turnover at the 3- to 6-month mark typically have some kind of problem or challenge in recruiting, hiring, or onboarding. By conducting stay interviews at this time, you have an opportunity to talk to people, see if they are discontented with the organization, and discover more about what they were told in the recruiting process. Did their expectations meet reality? When you discover what issues might be happening during hiring and onboarding, you can fix them. You have an opportunity to address the issue before a new hire becomes frustrated and starts to look for employment elsewhere.
Best Practices for Stay Interviews
What makes a great retention interview? How can you ensure you are conducting effective stay interviews and making the most of the information you gather?
One thing to keep in mind is that it’s best to outsource stay interviews to a third party, with the support of a supervisor or leader within the team. This allows employees to speak freely about their experiences, and it also means that you have an experienced professional synthesizing information from multiple stay interviews, turning these interviews into actionable strategies to change your overall company for the better.
Other best practices include:
- Schedule stay interviews, and let employees know what to expect so they have time to prepare and gather their thoughts
- Share the purpose of these interviews with your team so they understand they are mutually beneficial
- Conduct interviews in a safe, comfortable space to further foster trust and encourage your team to speak freely
- Ask open-ended questions to encourage a conversation rather than simple “yes” or “no” answers
- Explain that you care about your employees’ honest thoughts and feelings and that their insights will be taken seriously
- Follow up with employees after their stay interviews to thank them for their time and responses and demonstrate that you were really listening to what they had to say
- Take action based on what you learn in your interviews, and share these actions with employees so they feel heard and valued
What’s Next? How CRS Can Help
There’s so much to be learned from your team, and there is a lot of power in letting your employees share their thoughts.
Are you ready to take the next step to boost retention and foster engagement? Contact Combined Resource Solutions to learn more about conducting positive, proactive stay interviews at one or more points in the employee lifecycle to keep your top-performing talent on board, engaged, and happy.