Stay Interview Questions Template
Three documents and three sheets that rank who gets interviewed first from tenure, engagement and manager history you already hold.
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Interview Schedule
Two of the five highest scores share a manager
Marloe Logistics, fictional 240-person warehouse software company. Flight Risk Score: tenure band weight plus team engagement risk plus a recent manager-change bonus.
| Employee | Team | Manager | Score | Interviewer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amara Chukwu | Implementation Rotterdam | Tomas Berg | 67.5 | Routed: VP Customer |
| Ines Kowalczyk | Product and Design | Hanna Weiss | 52.5 | Direct manager |
| Jonas Eriksrud | Implementation Rotterdam | Tomas Berg | 51.5 | Routed: VP Customer |
| Devon Larsen | Platform | Ines Duarte | 37.5 | Direct manager |
Amara and Jonas both report to Tomas Berg, and both clear this quarter's interview threshold. Two or more flagged reports under one manager routes every one of that manager's interviews to a skip-level, because a stay interview run by the actual retention risk produces silence, not signal.
A stay interview questions template is a list: pick five or six from a set of categories, ask them in a 30-minute conversation, log the themes, assign an action. Every template we reviewed stops there. None of them say who gets one of those 30-minute conversations first. Most companies default to interviewing everyone, which does not scale past a small team, or interviewing whoever happens to ask, close to interviewing no one. That gap costs the most in the first year, exactly when an onboarding program was supposed to keep someone past it.
This pack ranks a workforce by a Flight Risk Score built from three things already on file. Tenure band is weighted against the published distribution of when voluntary turnover actually happens, about a third within the first year (Work Institute, Retention Report). Team engagement score adds risk in proportion to how far a team sits below full favorability. A recent manager change adds a fixed bonus. At Marloe Logistics, 240 employees, this ranks Amara Chukwu highest at 67.5, eleven months' tenure on a 33 percent team.
Amara's teammate Jonas Eriksrud also clears this quarter's threshold, and both report to the same manager, Tomas Berg. Two or more flagged reports under one manager routes every one of that manager's scheduled interviews to a skip-level instead, because a stay interview run by the actual retention risk produces silence rather than signal. The pack opens with the Interview Guide, Manager Preparation and Follow-up Note, then the Interview Schedule, Theme Register and Retention Action Log that carries each theme from the engagement survey to a named owner and date.
What is in the pack
Interview Guide
Open questions by category, motivation, friction, growth, recognition, workload and direct retention risk, with guidance to pick five or six per conversation.
Manager Preparation
How to ask the direct retention question without it sounding like a threat, and what a routed interviewer needs to know when they are not the direct manager.
Follow-up Note
What was heard, what is being done, and the honest version for anything that cannot change right now, sent while the conversation is still fresh.
Interview Schedule
Every employee ranked by Flight Risk Score, tenure band, team engagement and manager change combined, with the cut line for this quarter's real capacity.
Theme Register
What came out of each conversation and whether it needs escalating, so a pattern across several interviews under one manager becomes visible.
Retention Action Log
Every commitment made in a stay interview with a named owner and date, the same tracking discipline an action planning pack applies to survey commitments.
How it works
- 1
Send headcount, tenure and engagement scores
Current employees with start dates and manager assignments, the latest engagement survey by team, and any manager changes in the last six months.
- 2
Get the ranked Interview Schedule
Every employee scored by tenure band, team engagement and manager change, ranked and cut to the number of conversations you can actually run.
- 3
Flagged managers get routed automatically
Any manager with two or more of their own reports above the threshold has those specific interviews reassigned to a skip-level.
- 4
Log themes and commitments
Each conversation's themes go in the Theme Register, and every commitment gets a named owner and date in the Retention Action Log.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes. The whole pack, the Interview Guide, Manager Preparation and Follow-up Note, plus all three sheets, downloads as real files with no signup. Edit with AI is a separate, optional path that creates a free account and installs the same pack as a private workspace.
How is this different from a normal stay interview template?
Every stay interview template we reviewed is a question list with an action tracker bolted on. None of them decide who gets interviewed first. This pack ranks your workforce by tenure, team engagement and manager history you already hold, so a limited number of conversations goes to the highest-risk people.
Why would a 9-month employee score lower than a 132-month one?
Because tenure is only one of three inputs. Devon Larsen has 9 months on the company's highest-scoring team, 93 percent favorable, so his engagement risk is nearly zero. Marcus Obi has 11 years on a 54 percent team, which is enough engagement risk on its own to land close to the same score.
What happens when a manager gets flagged?
Every one of that manager's reports who cleared the interview threshold gets reassigned to a skip-level or HR business partner, quietly, without naming the manager as a confirmed cause to anyone. The flag changes who runs the conversation. It does not decide in advance what that conversation will find.
Won't the flagged manager notice their reports are being interviewed by someone else?
Possibly, and that is a smaller cost than the alternative. A stay interview conducted by the person a report might be describing produces a polite, uninformative conversation almost every time, which defeats the point of running one at all.
How many stay interviews should we actually run?
As many 30-minute conversations as your HR team can genuinely follow up on well, not as many as the ranked list could technically support. In the worked example, Marloe runs 12 of 240 employees a quarter, about 5 percent, and the schedule shows exactly where that cut line falls.
What format are the downloaded files?
Word documents for the Interview Guide, Manager Preparation and Follow-up Note, and CSV spreadsheets for the Interview Schedule, Theme Register and Retention Action Log. All open natively in Word, Google Docs, Excel or Sheets, and nothing requires a specific HRIS to compute the ranking.
Find out who your data says to talk to first
Send current headcount with tenure and manager assignments, and your latest engagement survey by team. The Interview Schedule comes back ranked, with any flagged manager already routed around.
Rank my interview list