Hiring GlossaryWhat are recruiting dashboards?
What is a recruiting dashboard?
The hiring process involves many touch points and milestones, which can quickly get unwieldy if you have more than a few recruiters, hiring managers or candidates in your pipeline. A recruiting dashboard is a visual representation of your recruitment performance.
Here’s what Michelle Yoshihara, Senior Manager of Talent Planning at Greenhouse, told SHRM: “A dashboard is a collection of information – one place where you can see everything and understand your performance as a recruiter and the performance of your recruiting team.”
Reporting needs vary from company to company, so there’s no single recruiting dashboard that will work for everyone, but some of the most common metrics talent acquisition (TA) professionals are interested in measuring include how many candidates are moving through the pipeline, which sources they’re coming from, how long they spend in each stage and how close the TA team is to meeting their hiring goals.
If you’re interested in setting up and using your own recruiting dashboard, here are a few key points to keep in mind:
- What are the main questions you’re trying to answer? Which data points will help you answer them?
- Who are the main audiences for your dashboard? You may want to generate some reports for yourself or other members of the TA team and others for your company leaders, for example.
- Where does the data normally live? It’s common for recruiting data to live in places like your applicant tracking system (ATS) or sourcing tool. How can you get the data from the source into a dashboard, and is there a way to ensure the data is accurate and up to date?
On that last point, if you’re already using a recruiting tool like an ATS or a sourcing tool, there’s a good chance that it has reporting or dashboard capabilities, so it’s worth exploring what options you have with your existing tools. If you don’t currently use recruiting technology, generating dashboards will be a little trickier, but not impossible.
What are the benefits of using recruiting dashboards?
Why use recruiting dashboards? For starters, dashboards are much more efficient than combing through all the data manually. Dashboards offer instant answers to your most pressing questions about your jobs, candidates and recruiting processes.
Because dashboards provide information at a glance, another benefit is that they can help you easily communicate with stakeholders. If you’ve ever had your CEO spontaneously ask you how many people you’ve hired this year or had the head of a department corner you to find out how close you are to making an offer on an open role, you know these ad hoc requests can be stressful and time-consuming. But with recruiting dashboards, you can quickly pull information and share it with stakeholders. In some cases, you may even be able to set up specific dashboards for different stakeholders so they can find this information themselves!
And, of course, one of the biggest reasons for having dashboards is that they provide insights that will help you make more-informed hiring decisions, achieve your growth goals and get measurably better at hiring. For example, a dashboard on talent sourcing can help you track how much you’re investing in different sourcing tools or strategies and where you’re seeing the best return on investment so you can be more strategic with how you approach sourcing in the future.
What are the essential metrics to track in your recruiting dashboard?
If you’re unsure of which metrics to track in your recruiting dashboard, it helps to start by understanding who the audience is and what questions they’re trying to answer by viewing the dashboard. In addition to yourself and other members of the TA team, some potential audiences include hiring managers, company leaders and members of your finance team. And some of the most common questions you’ll be trying to answer will relate to offers and hires, recruiting efficiency, sourcing and pipeline health.
For example, Michelle Yoshihara explained that recruiters tend to be looking at detailed metrics such as sourcing conversion rate, to understand how their messaging resonates with the market; pipeline conversion rates, to see where any breakdowns are occurring; and offer acceptance rate, to better understand the hiring manager’s role in the process. Leaders, though, tend to have different priorities, like keeping an eye on cost-per-hire or time-to-fill.
Here at Greenhouse, we’ve identified a few recruiting key performance indicators that we recommend tracking to get a good overview of your hiring process. These are:
- Qualified candidates per opening: The number of candidates who reach the first milestone in your hiring process
- Candidate survey results: The number of candidates who respond “yes” or “strong yes” to a prompt such as “Overall, my candidate experience was a positive one” in a post-interview survey, like the one offered through Greenhouse
- Days to offer: The number of days that pass between when people apply and when they ultimately accept or reject an offer
- Offer acceptance rate: The percentage of extended offers that are accepted
- Hires to goal: How well you are meeting your hiring objectives overall
Want to learn more about each of these KPIs and how to measure them? Find a detailed explanation here.
And if you’re already a Greenhouse customer, you can use report dashboards to pull data on the most common recruitment KPIs, including:
Offers and hires
- Offer acceptance rate
- Average time-to-fill
- Average time-to-hire
- Offers extended
- Offers accepted
- Hires to goal
Recruiting efficiency
- Average time-to-fill or days to offer
- Average time-to-hire
- Average time-in-stage
- Applications over time
Sourcing
- Referrals submitted
- Prospects added
- Internal applicants
- Applications over time
Pipeline health
- Qualified candidates per opening
- Number of current openings
- Number of open jobs
- Applications over time
- Pipeline history
- Candidate survey results
How can you use recruitment analytics to fuel continuous improvement?
Recruiting dashboards allow you to see how your recruiting team is performing right now – but that’s not all. You’ll be able to filter data by department, office, role and date range so you can slice and dice your data however you’d like with minimal hassle. You can also look back at historical trends to help you refine your recruiting strategies and improve in the future.
For example, when you follow a structured hiring process by identifying the qualities that will make someone successful in the role and assessing candidates consistently for those qualities, you will generate rich recruiting reporting that will help you refine your evaluation criteria. You will learn things like which types of questions or take-home assessments are most effective or whether there are any stages of the interview process where candidates tend to pass at much higher or lower rates. You can then adjust your recruitment process to get measurably better at hiring over time.
You can also begin to establish benchmarks such as the average time candidates spend in a particular stage or what the pass-through rates are from one stage to the next. Once you’ve defined these benchmarks, you can easily compare them to your current performance to get a quick pulse on how your team is doing and whether there are any areas that need your immediate attention.
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