42 percent of people who quit say it was preventable

In 2024, Gallup surveyed 717 people who had voluntarily left a job in the previous 12 months, a nationally representative sample of US workers. Forty-two percent said their manager or organization could have done something to stop them from leaving. Gallup also notes that the decision to leave often happens quickly.

What they said would have helped

The most common single answer was more pay or benefits, and it deserves its place at the top of the list. Compensation is often outside a manager's control. What stands out is how much of the remainder sits within a manager's reach. Of the changes leavers said could have prevented their exit, about three in 10 involved manager interactions: 21 percent wanted more positive ones, such as listening and communication, and 8 percent wanted fewer negative ones, such as rudeness or micromanaging. Ben Wigert, Gallup's director of research and strategy for workplace management, told HR Brew that most of the actions leavers named were things a manager could have done to manage them more effectively.

The conversation that didn't happen

Forty-five percent of leavers said that in the three months before they left, little was done by a manager or leader to bring up how their job was going. That figure covers more than a missed courtesy. A conversation about how the job is going is where a manager learns that someone feels stuck, underused, or overloaded, and it is where those things can still be fixed. Without it, the first time a manager hears about the problem may be the resignation. Gallup's authors call a three-month silence from a manager too long, and the data gives them reason to.

What this suggests for hiring

This data covers voluntary leavers in general, not new hires, so it can't say when in a tenure those conversations stopped. It does show where leavers themselves point: the relationship between a person and the one they report to.

That puts the manager into the hiring decision, because the person a candidate will report to is half of the pairing. Meta-analyses of person-supervisor fit find it tracks supervisor satisfaction at roughly 0.46, and overall performance far more weakly, at roughly 0.18. Our compatibility post goes into where similarity helps and where a difference does. We model that pairing: the candidate's profile alongside the profile of the person they would report to. In practice, that adds a question many hiring teams skip, which is how this candidate's way of working fits with this particular manager's.

The takeaway

Four in 10 leavers think someone could have kept them. For a hiring team, the earliest chance to act on that comes before the offer: who will this person work for, and what does that pairing look like?