Making sense of all the recruitment metrics in your organization—number of applications, screening calls, interviews—can be a daunting task, even for the most tech-savvy recruiters. This is where a recruitment dashboard comes in handy. It can help you bring together a rundown of all the recruitment data in your organization, and predict what’s going to happen and plan your next actions.
But, how to create a dashboard that curates all the recruitment data for you in one place?
In this article, you’ll uncover:
- 5 simple steps to help you skyrocket your recruitment process
- A free recruitment dashboard template
Let’s get started!
What is a recruitment dashboard?
A recruitment dashboard is a visual representation, often interactive, of various recruitment metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Think of it as the control room of your recruiting operations. Just like how a car’s dashboard provides essential information about speed, fuel, and engine health, a recruiting dashboard offers HR insights into the hiring process’s effectiveness and efficiency.
Key elements typically displayed include:
Number of open positions: A simple count of how many roles you’re currently looking to fill.
Source of candidates: Breakdown of where your candidates are coming from – job boards, referrals, direct applications, etc.
Time-to-Hire: Average time taken from when a role is advertised to when an offer is accepted.
Application-to-Interview ratios: How many applications lead to an actual interview? This metric offers insights into the quality of applications.
Cost-per-Hire: An understanding of how much, on average, you spend to recruit a new employee.
Candidate feedback: Scores or feedback from candidates about their experience during the recruitment process.
Diversity metrics: Information about the diversity of candidates applying and being hired.
This dynamic tool evolves with your recruitment process, helping HR professionals, hiring managers, and even company executives get a quick snapshot of the hiring landscape.
Steps to Create HR Recruitment Dashboard Template?
Step 1: Know what you want
Create a list of questions you want to be answered. These questions will help understand your team’s performance better. Whether you’re a one-man/woman team or a 50-member team, this step is highly valuable. It will help you create a layout for the detailed recruitment steps required to hire the right candidates for your organization.
You can start with the following list: (feel free to add on to it)
- How much time does it take for a candidate to complete the hiring process?
- At which stage are the candidates dropping off
- How many candidates does it take to close one role?
- What percentage of the open roles is my team able to close in 1 quarter?
- How many critical roles are there to fill (roles that are open for more than 60 days)?
- On average, how much does it cost to hire a candidate?
- How many applicants get past the screening stage?
- How many candidates accept the offer and join?
- How many offer dropouts do you have?
- How many candidates drop off during the entire process?
Based on the industry or company you work in, there may be a lot more questions. List them out and get started.
Step 2: Identify key metrics
Once you’ve nailed step 1, achieving this step will be relatively easy. Take all the questions you have identified and find the relevant metrics for each of these questions. Also, identify the input metrics for each of these.
Input metrics is basically the data you need to calculate the key metrics.
For example, to calculate cost per hire, you need to know the total amount that was spent on recruitment activities and the number of open roles. Therefore, the amount spent and no. of open roles are your input metrics for the key metric—cost per hire.
| Question | Key metric | Input metrics |
| How much time does it take for a candidate to complete this whole process? | Avg. time to hire | Time to hire for individual roles (in days), no. of roles |
| At which stage are the candidates dropping off? | Bottleneck bucket | No. of drop-offs per recruitment phase |
| How many candidates does it take to close one role? | Conversion rate | No. of candidates, no. of roles |
| What % of the open roles is my team able to close in 1 quarter (success rate)? | Closure rate | No. of open positions, no. of positions closed |
| How many critical roles are there to fill (roles open for more than 60 days)? | No. of critical roles | Time duration for which each of the roles were open |
| How much does it cost to hire a candidate on average? | Cost per hire | Amount spent on recruitment activities, no. of closed positions |
| How many applicants are qualified for the perusal? | Qualification rate | No. of applicants, no. of candidates who passed the screening stage |
| How many candidates accept the offer and come through? | Offer acceptance rate | No. of offers rolled out, no. of offers accepted |
| How many offer drop-offs do we have? | Offer drop-off rate | No. of offers rolled out, no. of offer drop-offs |
| How many candidates drop off during the entire process? | Application drop-off rate | No. of applicants, no. of candidates who didn’t show up in any stage of the recruitment process. |
Step 3: Collate the data
Gather your data for these metrics from all your sources. For example, your ATS, Excel sheets, or a combination of both. Many organizations also utilize HR software to streamline the collection and management of recruitment data. If you are looking for an efficient HRM tool already, it’s good to explore tomHRM alternatives that could offer additional features or better align with your specific needs.
Identify where you can get all your input metrics from and start adding them to an Excel sheet. Once you have the input metrics, it’s time to calculate the key metrics. You can use the formula below to get the numbers.
| Key metric | Formula |
| Time to hire | Time taken to hire for each role / Number of roles |
| Cost per hire | Amount spent on advertisements and other hiring activities / Number of roles |
| Qualification rate | (No. of applications screened – no. of applications that went to the next stage) / No. of applications screened *100 |
| Conversion rate | No. of candidates per role closed / No. of applications for that role *100 |
| Closure rate | No. of roles closed/Total no. Of roles in the quarter *100 |
| No. of critical roles | No. of roles that have been open for more than 60 days |
| Offer acceptance rate | No. of offers accepted / Total no. of offers rolled out * 100 |
| Offer drop-off rate | No. of offer drop-offs / Total no. of offers rolled out * 100 |
| Application drop off rate | No. of candidates that dropped out at some stage in the process / Total no. of candidates * 100 |
Side note: This process can get a little time-consuming. If you don’t want to set it up yourself, you can use the template where all the formulas are already set up. You just need to add in your input metrics.
Also read: Kaleyra Reduces Its Screening Time By 50% Using HackerEarth
Step 4: Make it look stunning
No dashboard is good enough if it doesn’t ‘look good.’ A few simple steps can make it look a lot better than just a list of numbers:
- Use simple fonts
- Use appropriate alignment
- Use colors to differentiate the data
- Use charts to help you depict the data better.
Step 5: Analyze data and present insights
Remember, the most important aspect of a dashboard is what you infer from it. How will it benefit you if you create the dashboard and send it out? You can establish your expertise by carefully analyzing the data and creating new action steps.
What Metrics Should You Track on Your Dashboard?
Let’s take a look at how a few of these metrics can contribute to proactive action steps:
Average time to hire
If your average time to hire is beyond your company threshold, then you know that you need to improve the recruitment process. The company threshold may vary for each company. If you are an extremely fast-paced company, then your limit might be less than 30 days. 60 days is an average across many companies and some companies are even ok with 90 days.
So if your threshold is 60 days and your average time to hire is 65 days, then you know that business is getting affected and the recruitment process needs to be optimized. To do this, it’s important to understand which phase is the bottleneck.
Also read: Reduce time-to-hire developers with coding assessments.
Bottleneck bucket
This one’s straightforward, the phase that is your bottleneck bucket needs a revamp. For example, if your bottleneck bucket is the interview phase because 50% of the candidates don’t show up for the interview, then you probably aren’t selling the role well enough.
Remember, as a recruiter it’s your job to ‘sell’ the role and it’s the candidates’ job to ‘sell’ what they can do for the company in the interview. So once you find your bottleneck bucket try to fix what’s not working.
Conversion rate
If your conversion rate is low, then you know you’re putting in a lot of effort to close one position, and if that’s going to continue, then your team will burn out or be in a ‘perpetually busy’ state. That’s not where you want your team to be.
Fixing this ties back to the previous metric of the bottleneck. Find out at what part of the process is the biggest bottleneck and try to fix that. That will have an impact on your conversion rate. Or it should at least point you in the right direction of what needs fixing.
This way you analyze all your metrics—where they stand and what are the actions you need to take to fix it. Add these action steps to the dashboard and send them across to your team to be a Rockstar recruiter!
Now that you know that you need to create a template, you can either get started from scratch or you can download the template here:
How to use the recruitment template included?
In the template, most of the important metrics are included and ready to use. Let me give you a quick tour. This template is designed for a quarterly review. You can convert it to suit a monthly review too. You need to use the following three sheets:
- Role tracker sheet: This sheet gives you an overview of all the roles that have been opened and the status of each role.
- Candidate tracker sheet: This sheet tracks the status of all the candidates that have applied for any role. If you use an ATS, you can export the data from the tool into this sheet.
- Dashboard sheet: This sheet gives you a summary of the performance of your recruitment process. It includes twelve (ten in the chart above and two below) of the most important metrics that most companies track. All these metrics are automatically calculated based on the inputs of the role tracker sheet and the candidate tracker sheet.
- Overview of the current status of roles:
- No. of target roles for the quarter
- Total roles closed to date
- Open roles
- Roles in the offer stage
- Roles on hold
- Roles open beyond 60 days
- The efficiency of the recruitment process:
- Average time to hire
- Amount spent this quarter
- Cost per hire
- Qualified candidates’ rate
- Offer acceptance rate
- Application drop off rate
- Overview of the current status of roles:
There is a sheet that gives you all the instructions on how to use the template and what each of the terms means. You can always refer to this sheet to understand how to use this sheet.
Tools needed to create a recruiting dashboard
With advancements in online software, creating a recruitment dashboard has never been easier. Here are some of the top tools to consider in 2024:
Tableau: Renowned for its data visualization capabilities, Tableau allows you to craft detailed, interactive dashboards by connecting to various data sources.
Microsoft Power BI: A powerful tool, especially for those familiar with the Microsoft ecosystem. Power BI offers extensive customization options and can integrate seamlessly with tools like Excel.
Google Data Studio: A free tool by Google, it’s excellent for those just starting out. With integrations to Google Sheets and other G-suite apps, it’s a convenient option for many.
Zoho Analytics: Specifically designed for business intelligence, Zoho offers a plethora of pre-made templates, including those for recruitment.
Trello and Airtable: While not traditional dashboard tools, by leveraging their integrations and plugins, recruiters can create visual boards that give a snapshot of the recruitment process.
Recruiting software with built-in dashboards: Many ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) and recruiting platforms now come with built-in dashboard functionalities. Examples include Greenhouse, Workable, and SmartRecruiters.
I hope that this guide and template will help you get one step closer to understanding how to create a recruiting metrics dashboard.
