The ultimate guide to hiring dashboards: the essential dashboard

Over the past twenty years, businesses have become exceedingly data-driven. Nearly every department of a business, from sales and marketing to finance and engineering, has the tools in place to report on progress toward their goals, forecast productivity, and prove the ROI of their efforts. 

While Talent Acquisition (TA) has shared in this data-driven revolution, it has been (and in some cases, still is) plagued by a disorganized pile of spreadsheets, hours of manual data entry, and disparate data silos requiring pentagon-level clearance to access. Luckily, new technologies have emerged in recent years that provide the insights needed to make better, data-driven decisions and strengthen the partnership between TA and all key stakeholders in the hiring process. In a world where data-driven decisions are par for the course, creating a well-thought-out hiring dashboard will allow you to visualize trends, gather insights, spot bottlenecks, and optimize your recruiting process.

But this is all still relatively new, and starting out can be tough. Whether you’ve been tasked with creating the first hiring dashboard for your organization or improving an existing one, it can feel like you’re being thrown into the deep end of a pool without a life jacket. What do you measure? How do you measure it? Why do certain metrics matter? At this point, you probably have more questions than answers, but don’t worry; we’re here to help. 

In this series, we’ll walk you through the different types of hiring dashboards (yes, there are different types). We’ll show you how to tailor your dashboard depending on the specific stakeholder you're sharing that information with, the conversation you're looking to have, and what aspect of your talent acquisition funnel you want to examine. In addition, we’ll talk through the recruiting metrics you should be tracking and why; and finally, we’ll give you some templates you can use today to build the perfect hiring dashboard for your needs without spending hours poring over spreadsheets, manually entering data into your ATS, or constantly bugging your recruiters. 

If you’d like to read the other articles in our Ultimate Guide to Hiring Dashboards series check out the links below:

• The Essential Dashboard

• The Recruiting Health Dashboard

• The Pipeline Composition Dashboard

• The Recruiting Team Productivity Dashboard

Disclaimer: The metrics and dashboards shown below are all based on Gem’s platform. If you’re not a Gem user (yet!), we still recommend you take a look at these metrics and track them as best you can. 

Key metrics to include in your hiring dashboard: 

• Hiring goals

• Total hires/Goal progress

• Job openings

• Current hiring pipeline

• Offer acceptance rate

• Time to fill 

• Time to hire

• Offer decline reasons

Here’s what your hiring dashboard might look like in Gem: 

Now there’s a lot going on here. Let’s break these down one by one. 

Hiring goals

Whether or not your organization is meeting its hiring goals is the ultimate measure of your TA team’s success. If your company isn’t hitting its growth plan, so many other things can’t happen: the product doesn’t get built, revenue targets are missed, and your company mission and vision may suffer. 

Every company’s hiring goals will be different. However, setting a realistic goal based on historical hiring data and current recruiting capacity will give your TA team something to work toward and provide a benchmark on which you can measure their success. Work with finance and leadership teams to determine the organization's growth goals while taking into account metrics like historical conversion rates, time to fill, current candidate pipeline, etc., as well as potential limitations like the recruiting capacity of your current TA team. Once you’ve got your goals nailed down, adding them to your hiring dashboard will ensure accountability throughout your team.

Total hires/Goal progress

Once you have your hiring goal set, tracking the total number of hires your team has made will clearly indicate how you are progressing toward your goal. Adding this metric to your dashboard will let you know if you’re on track at your current hiring pace or if you’re likely to fall short, in which case you may need to reevaluate your goal or optimize the talent acquisition process itself. 

Job openings

The number of open roles shows you precisely how much ground you have left to cover to meet your hiring goal. Looking at the number of open reqs in relation to your team’s hiring capacity will allow you to forecast more accurately whether or not your team will be able to meet your hiring goals. 

Building this metric into your hiring dashboard can also help with resource conversations—if the number of open job reqs has grown quarter-over-quarter but no new TA headcount has been brought on, you can use this data to make the case for why more resources are needed to meet your organization’s hiring goals. 

Current hiring pipeline

Your current hiring pipeline is essentially a snapshot of how many candidates are at each stage of your hiring process. While your pipeline is likely constantly changing and (hopefully) improving, it’s still important to include it in your hiring dashboard as it will allow you to present your TA team’s efforts to internal stakeholders and answer tactical questions like: How many candidates are currently in process? Where are the sticking points in your hiring process? How many offers have your team extended? And so on. 

Offer acceptance rate 

Offer acceptance rate (OAR) looks at how many offers your organization is extending and what percentage of those offers are accepted in a given quarter. A good OAR indicates that your TA team has brought high-quality candidates into your funnel, moved them through the process smoothly, and worked with cross-functional stakeholders to extend enticing offers to those candidates. In addition, in Gem you can look at industry benchmarks for metrics like offer acceptance rate to see how similar companies’ metrics compare to yours.

Time to fill

Time to fill (TTF) is the number of days between the approval of a job requisition and when a candidate accepts an offer. Time to fill provides a holistic view of how fast your organization can bring in qualified candidates and move them through the recruiting process. This includes the logistics of creating and posting job descriptions, sourcing candidates, coordinating interviews, etc. Adding time to fill in your hiring dashboard will give you a realistic view of how long it will actually take to fill a role and allow you to forecast more accurate hiring targets and set expectations. 

Time to hire 

Time to hire (TTH) takes away the pre-funnel logistics (job posting, sourcing, etc.) and looks specifically at how long it takes for one candidate to pass through your hiring funnel. Time to hire starts as soon as a candidate is entered into your applicant tracking system (ATS) and ends once they accept an offer. This illustrates the velocity and health of your hiring process aside from all external variables that may impact time to fill. 

Naturally, you’ll want your time to hire to be as short as possible (for suitable candidates, of course). A faster time to hire means a smaller likelihood that a good candidate will get a competing offer before you can bring them on, and it improves candidate experience (nobody wants to spend months stuck in a slow hiring process). 

You can measure time to hire by average or median; however, we’ve found that median time to hire provides more accurate measurement in datasets with significant outliers (i.e., if a recruiter forgot to close a req) that may skew your data one way or another.

Pro tip: When tracking metrics like time to fill and time to hire, keep in mind that different industries, roles, and seniority levels can have drastically different times to hire. For example, the time to fill a senior-level software engineer role will likely be much greater than the time it takes to fill an entry-level sales role. 

Offer decline reasons 

Offer declines are tough. They take a financial toll on the business as time and resources have been spent on interviews, assessments, etc., and they take an emotional toll on the recruiter who put so much effort into moving the candidate through the hiring process. 

Adding offer decline reasons to your hiring dashboard will allow you to keep better track of the reasons candidates are rejecting offers and will provide insight on how to ensure that fewer rejections occur in the future. Within your Gem dashboard, you can also customize the offer decline reasons to provide additional granularity in your analysis. 

For example, if you see a spike in candidates rejecting offers due to compensation, it’s possible that your package for a certain role is not competitive with the market. This is a powerful data source you can share with organizational leadership to petition for an increase in salary or benefits for that role. 

As a RecOps professional, you know the value of good data—it informs nearly every facet of your job and empowers you to make better decisions for your TA team. Creating a robust hiring dashboard is the key to better understanding your recruiting data, strengthening your partnership with all internal stakeholders, and implementing positive changes throughout your recruiting org.

If you’d like to learn more about how to build your own hiring dashboard, get in touch with us today!