5 Steps to Creating a Recruiting Dashboard (+ Free Template)

7 min readAug 23, 2019

Recruitment is at the core of any organization. It is a well-known fact that today’s recruitment strategies are highly data-driven. Recruitment metrics such as the number of applications, screening calls, interviews, and more are often tracked in an Excel sheet. However, making sense of all the recruitment data your organization collects 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, helping you predict what’s going to happen and plan your next actions.

Here’s how you can create a recruitment dashboard in 5 simple steps to help you skyrocket your recruitment process.
However, if you don’t have the patience to build your own, you can just download the template attached and read the instructions on the “instructions” sheet.

Download the recruiting dashboard template

Step 1: Know what you want

The first thing you need in place is a list of questions you want answered. Don’t worry about how you’ll answer them just yet. Just focus on getting the right questions. These are questions that 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.

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 an 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.

What are input metrics? They are the data you need to calculate the key metrics. For example, in order 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.

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.

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.

This 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.

Step 4: Make it look stunning

No dashboard is good enough if it doesn’t ‘look good.’ A few simple steps and you 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
And 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. Your can establish your expertise by carefully analyzing the data and creating new action steps.

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 really need to improve the recruitment process. The company threshold may vary from 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.

Bottleneck bucket

This one’s straight-forward, the phase that is your bottleneck bucket needs a revamp. For e.g., 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 bottle neck. Find out at what part of the process is the biggest bottle neck and try to fix that. That will definitely 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 it across to your team to be a Rockstar recruiter!

Now that you know you that you need to create a template, you can either get started from scratch or you can download the template here:

Download the recruiting dashboard template

How to use the 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 current status of roles:
- No. of target roles for the quarter
- Total roles closed till date
- Open roles
- Roles in the offer stage
- Roles on hold
- Roles open beyond 60 days
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

There is a sheet which gives you all the instructions of how to use the template and what each of the terms mean. You can always refer this sheet to understand how to use this sheet.

I really hope that this guide and template will help you get one step closer to understanding how to create a recruitment dashboard by analyzing metrics. Feel free to get in touch by writing to me at harshini@hackerearth.com or leave your thoughts in the Comments section below.