A stay interview is a structured one-on-one conversation with a current employee about what keeps them at your practice and what would push them toward the door.
You hold it while they still work for you, so you can act on the answer before a resignation letter arrives.
The lead time matters: AAHA, citing its 2022 staffing survey, reports that full-time DVM and credentialed technician positions take, on average, over a year to fill.
Rules vary by state and change
This guide explains federal rules and the state rules it names, as of the date above.
Employment law and veterinary practice rules differ by state and are revised often, so confirm current requirements with your state veterinary board, labor agency or employment counsel before you act on them.
It is general information, not legal advice.
Stay interview vs exit interview vs performance review
The three conversations sound alike and do different jobs, and the difference is timing.
A stay interview happens while the person still works for you, so the answer is something you can still act on.
An exit interview happens after notice has been given — it explains a loss and sharpens your next hiring round, but it cannot save the working relationship it describes.
A performance review evaluates the work against the role.
It is scheduled and documented — hardly a setting that invites someone to mention they have been browsing job listings.
| Stay interview | Exit interview | Performance review | |
|---|---|---|---|
| When | While the person is still on the team | After notice is given | On a fixed schedule |
| Question it answers | What would make you stay — and what would pull you away? | Why are you leaving? | How well is the work being done? |
| What you can do with it | Fix the problem while the person is still yours to keep | Learn for the next hire | Coach, promote, document |
Timing is why the tool exists in veterinary medicine.
AAHA's "Stay, Please" study surveyed current and former veterinary professionals between March 10–30, 2023 — 133,259 invitations, 14,414 completed responses, a nearly 11% response rate — and found that 30% of surveyed veterinary professionals in clinical practice planned to leave their current job within the next year.
Half of the people planning to leave — 15% of respondents — said they planned to leave clinical practice altogether.
Read that 30% for what it is: a share of people who plan to leave, not a turnover rate.
AAHA's study publishes intent-to-leave shares, not turnover rates, so it will not tell you what percent of a veterinary team actually quits in a year.
What it does tell you is who the tool is for — the 30% who were already thinking about leaving when someone finally asked.
Stay interview questions to ask your veterinary team
There is no certified question bank, and a script read aloud will get you scripted answers.
What the data gives you is a map of the ground to cover.
In AAHA's study, the most-selected reasons among people planning to stay were teamwork (40.8%), practicing modern medicine (34.3%), meaningful work (32.2%), fair compensation (30.2%) and flexibility (27.6%).
The people planning to leave named what would change their minds: fair compensation (52.5%), appreciation for their work (29.0%), career development (25.6%), teamwork (24.2%) and caring leadership (24.1%).
A good question set probes both lists — the pull and the push.
Questions that find the pull
- What part of working here would be the hardest to walk away from?
- When did you last finish a day here feeling like the job was worth it? What happened that day?
- Which parts of your license or training get used here — and which sit idle?
- Who on this team makes your best days better?
- What do you want to be better at a few years from now, and is anything here helping you get there?
Questions that find the push
- If a recruiter called you tomorrow, what would have to be in the offer for you to hear them out?
- Do you feel your pay is fair for the work you actually do? What would fair look like?
- When did someone last tell you that you did a good job? How did they tell you?
- What part of your week quietly wears you down — the schedule, the caseload, the way appointments run?
- Where does the friction on the team come from, and what is it about?
- If you could hand me one complaint and know it would get fixed, what would it be?
The set works across roles — an associate veterinarian, a credentialed technician, a client-service representative (CSR) and a kennel attendant all have a pull list and a push list, even where the answers cluster differently.
Three habits make the answers usable.
Ask the same core set of everyone, so you can compare across roles instead of reacting to whoever talks loudest.
Take notes during the conversation, not from memory afterward.
And keep your side of it to questions and listening — the first time you defend a policy in a stay interview is usually the last time that person brings you a real answer.
Who should run a stay interview, and how often
Run it one-on-one, in a private space, away from the treatment floor and the front desk, and book it on the schedule like an appointment you would not bump for a walk-in.
A stay interview squeezed between appointments reads as a formality and gets formality back.
Who asks matters as much as what gets asked.
For an associate veterinarian, the owner or medical director is the person to consider; for technicians, assistants, CSRs and kennel staff, consider the practice manager.
But think hard before defaulting to the direct supervisor: if part of the honest answer is about that supervisor, the conversation will not surface it.
A second owner, a hospital administrator or a manager outside the person's direct line can run some or all of them instead.
The two requirements are someone the employee can be candid with and someone who can actually act on what they hear.
On cadence, start with once or twice a year for tenured staff, and add an early check-in for new hires inside their first couple of months, while a preventable quit is still preventable.
Keep the stay interview off the review calendar and away from raise discussions — the moment it is tied to a pay decision it becomes a negotiation, and you will hear negotiating positions instead of the truth.
And hold them when nothing looks wrong.
Waiting until someone seems unhappy is how you end up having this conversation as an exit interview instead.
Turning stay interview answers into action
The interview earns nothing until something happens afterward, and the failure mode is well understood: a practice asks, hears hard things, changes nothing, and teaches the team that honesty is wasted.
Close the loop the same week.
Thank the person, tell them what you heard so they know you listened, and sort what you heard into three buckets — fix now, fix by a date, cannot change.
Say plainly which bucket each answer landed in.
People accept an honest no far better than an open loop.
Look for themes before acting on any single answer.
One person's scheduling complaint is a conversation; the same complaint from three people is a policy.
Some themes point at money, and AAHA's study says take them seriously: among people planning to leave, fair compensation was the most-named change that would make them stay — 52.5%, well ahead of appreciation for work at 29.0% — and the study is direct that a practice with high turnover of credentialed techs will find fair pay a much stronger driver of their attrition than any other factor.
If pay comes up, do not negotiate in the room and do not guess at the market either.
Check your bands before the conversations start — the salary guides for vet techs and associate veterinarians are the place to do that — so that when the question arrives you can answer it accurately instead of reflexively.
Then keep the promises you make.
Write down what was asked and what you committed to, put a review date on it, and report progress back to the team.
A theme you genuinely cannot fix — a limitation of the building, the caseload, the budget — should be named as such, once, honestly.
Do not be the practice that heard it and changed nothing.
The themes that come up in veterinary stay interviews
Every team is its own case, but AAHA's study gives you a shortlist of where veterinary answers cluster — and each theme has a question that surfaces it and an owner who can act on it.
- Pay. The most-named change among people planning to leave (52.5%). If answers cluster here, the work is a compensation review against your market, not a quick gesture. If your credentialed technicians keep leaving, AAHA's study points at pay first.
- Teamwork. The top reason stayers gave for staying (40.8%). Listen for specifics: who covers lunches and breaks, who takes the hard restraints, how the front desk and the treatment area treat each other.
- Doing the medicine they trained for. Practicing modern medicine (34.3%) and meaningful work (32.2%) both read as whether skills are being used — technicians doing technician work instead of tasks below their credential, associates with the equipment and caseload to practice the way they were taught.
- Appreciation and development. Among people planning to leave, 29.0% named appreciation for their work and 25.6% named career development. The first is a habit problem — who says it, how often, about what. The second is a structure problem: CE support, a ladder to climb, a credential the practice will fund.
- Flexibility. Named by 27.6% of stayers. In a practice this is rarely abstract — think the schedule, the weekend rotation, the last-minute shift change.
- Leadership. Caring leadership was named by 24.1% of the people planning to leave. It is also the theme you cannot delegate: if the answer is about how the practice is led, the fix belongs to whoever leads it.
The deep end of this topic belongs to the role guides, which own the why-they-leave analysis for each position: why associates leave, why vet techs leave, and what drives entry-level turnover in assistant and kennel roles.
Read those for the patterns; run stay interviews to find out which pattern is live in your building.
For the rest of the employment lifecycle — hiring, screening, pay, contracts, onboarding — the veterinary hiring hub is the index.
Before your first round of stay interviews
- Decide who runs each conversation — someone the person can be candid with, who is not always their direct supervisor
- Book private time on the schedule, away from appointments, and treat it as unmovable
- Pick a core question set and ask everyone the same ones, so answers compare across roles
- Check your pay bands against the market before you ask about pay, so the question never catches you guessing
- Sort every answer into fix now, fix by a date, or cannot change — and tell the person which it was
- Review the answers for team-wide themes before acting on any single conversation