Stay and Exit Interviews for Clinicians: Questions That Reveal Why People Leave

A stay interview and an exit interview ask versions of the same question at different moments.

A stay interview happens while a clinician is still employed and still persuadable: what is working, what is wearing them down, what would make them stay.

An exit interview happens at or after departure, when the person can compare your practice honestly against wherever they are headed next.

The timing changes what each one can do.

A stay interview can still change the outcome, because nothing has been decided — you get the answer while there is still a role to adjust.

An exit interview almost never changes the leaver's mind, but it is where someone with nothing left to lose can tell you plainly why the departure happened.

The exit interview explains a departure; the stay interview is where you still have a chance to prevent the next one.

Treat both as a management practice, not a program with a guaranteed payoff: our research found no source measuring how much stay or exit interviews reduce turnover, so the test is whether the answers change what you do next.

A practice that collects interviews and never acts pays the calendar cost without the benefit.

They also fail differently.

A badly run exit interview costs you information you were owed anyway.

A badly run stay interview is worse — it signals you care, then nothing changes, and a clinician who watched that happen has little reason to answer honestly the next time.

Whatever structure you build, build the follow-through first.

You do not have to invent the question list.

In the BACB's 2025 exit survey, former RBTs were asked what would bring them back to the field, and respondents overwhelmingly named better pay, consistent and predictable scheduling, and more professional support.

Those are the levers a stay interview should probe — the same items show up as reasons people leave, which makes them the questions worth asking while someone is still in the chair.

A workable set for a clinician at your practice:

• "What would make you start looking for a new job?" — asked plainly, it invites a specific answer instead of reassurance.
• "If you received an offer elsewhere tomorrow, what would we have to change for you to stay?" — surfaces the real trigger, not the polite one.
• "Which parts of your schedule are predictable, and which keep moving on you?" — an unpredictable schedule was among the exit survey's named reasons for leaving.
• "Do you have too much work, too little, or the wrong kind?" — too many or too few weekly hours was a named reason for leaving, and it cuts both ways.
• "What does support from your supervisor look like on your best weeks, and what is missing on your worst?" — lack of supervisor support was one of the workplace-culture reasons leavers gave.
• "What skill or credential do you want to build next, and is there a path to it here?" — 41% of former RBTs said limited opportunities for professional growth influenced their decision to stop working as an RBT.
• "What is one thing we could take off your plate this month?" — ends the conversation with something you can actually change quickly.

Keep every question on work conditions.

Under the ADA — which covers employers with 15 or more employees — an employer may not ask a current employee whether they have a disability, or about its nature or severity, unless the inquiry is job-related and consistent with business necessity, and that limit applies to stay and exit interview questions too.

So no questions about diagnoses, medication or therapy, and no open invitation like "anything about your health you want us to know?" — that item stays risky even framed as voluntary.

Ask about schedule, caseload, supervision and growth instead, and leave health matters to your accommodation process and, where coverage questions arise, employment counsel.

An exit interview is a survey instrument with one respondent, so design it like one.

A public model worth designing from is the BACB's own: in February and March 2025 the board surveyed 30,018 people whose RBT certification expired in 2024 and who held no other BACB credential, and 1,386 responded — a 4.6% response rate, so every number is what respondents reported rather than a census.

We read that survey in full, response caveats included, in our RBT turnover guide; here it is as a design template.

Three design lessons come straight out of it:

• Make it multi-select. The board let respondents select multiple reasons, and they did: inadequate pay was named by 57% of respondents, poor treatment by the company by 44%, and concerning issues in the workplace by 42%. Respondents named several reasons at once, and a single-choice form flattens the picture into whichever reason feels biggest that day.
• Include a personal-circumstances option. 58% of respondents chose "I like the work, but life took me in a different direction." Life circumstances are not all within an employer's control — but if the form lacks that option, every departure gets attributed to a workplace reason, and your workplace fixes start chasing noise.
• Ask the re-entry question. Asked what would bring them back, respondents overwhelmingly named better pay, consistent and predictable scheduling, and more professional support. "What would make you consider coming back?" may be the most actionable line on the form.

A short exit interview for a departing clinician:

• What made you start looking? Ask it as an open question first, before the form biases the answer.
• Which of these played a part? Then the multi-select list: pay, pay predictability, weekly hours, schedule predictability, supervision, professional growth, treatment by the company, workload with clients, isolation, commute or travel between sites, personal circumstances.
• What would have kept you?
• What would make you consider coming back?
• What should we change before the next person sits in your seat?

Keep your categories identical from one departure to the next so the answers aggregate — the last section covers how to track them.

For exit interviews, choose someone the departing clinician did not report to: the person they worked for day to day hears politer answers, and may be the subject of the answers.

The options are a practice manager or HR lead, a clinical director outside their supervision chain, or an outside third party — a trade-off between candor and context, since the outsider hears more but never sees the follow-up land.

Whoever it is needs two things: no stake in defending the practice, and the standing to carry what they hear to someone who can act.

Stay interviews are harder to delegate.

The direct supervisor is the person who can actually change the schedule, the caseload or the growth path, so the answers land with someone who can use them — but the same proximity makes honesty harder when the problem is the supervisor.

In a small practice the owner is the realistic choice to conduct them; in a larger group, one workable pattern is supervisors holding the conversations while someone outside the chain aggregates what came up.

Pick the structure where a clinician can criticize the answer-giver's own decisions without risking the relationship.

Confidentiality is a policy you set, not a legal status.

Nothing we can source makes an exit interview answer legally privileged, so do not promise a departing clinician legal protection.

Decide before the first interview who sees raw notes, share themes rather than quotes wherever you can, and say plainly how the answers will be used.

The same rules are what make stay interviews safe to answer honestly — a stay interview that ends in gossip ends your access to honest answers.

An interview program earns its calendar time here or not at all.

The mechanics are unglamorous: after each round of interviews, sort the answers into themes, pick the one or two you can actually change, put a name and a date on each fix, and tell staff what changed and why.

The tell-people step is the easiest to skip, and it is the one that keeps the next round honest — a clinician who watched nothing happen has little reason to keep reporting what they see.

Separate the controllable from the not.

Some departures are life: the 58% who told the BACB "life took me in a different direction" were largely not describing a fixable workplace problem, and no scheduling change keeps a clinician whose family is moving.

Read the personal-circumstances answers as a share rather than a mystery — if they crowd out the workplace items on your forms, weight the workplace items you do get more heavily.

Either way, the workplace reasons are the ones a practice can act on.

Then close the loop with stay interviews.

When a fix lands — a scheduling change, a supervision adjustment, a funded credential — ask the clinicians you interviewed whether it changed anything.

That second question turns the stay interview from a conversation into a feedback loop, and it is how a practice learns which levers actually matter in its own shop.

Stay and exit interviews are one input into retention, not the whole job — our clinician retention guide covers the caseload, pay and burnout evidence for licensed clinicians.

And when the themes point at open seats — workload spread across a team that is two clinicians short — the fix is partly hiring, and our behavioral health hiring hub indexes the role-by-role guides.

Interview answers only compound if they land in the same buckets every time.

Keep a short, fixed category list — pay, pay predictability, weekly hours, schedule predictability, supervision, professional growth, treatment by the company, workload with clients, isolation, commute, personal circumstances — and tag every stay-interview theme and every exit form against it.

The list mirrors the BACB exit survey's categories, so your tallies speak the same language as the numbers quoted on this page.

Review the tallies on a fixed rhythm — a quarterly review is a workable default — and cut them three ways: by role, by site, and by supervisor.

Clusters matter more than totals.

A commute complaint is information; six of them from one site is a decision.

Two cautions for small teams.

First, percentages swing hard at low counts — one departure moves a five-person practice's numbers enormously — so read repeated themes rather than rates.

Second, keep stay and exit answers in the same system: a theme that surfaces in stay interviews and later appears on exit forms is a fix that was named and missed, and that pattern is the most expensive one on this page.