The ultimate guide to hiring dashboards: the recruiting health dashboard

As today’s hiring market continues to exceed expectations and baffle even the most seasoned talent acquisition professionals, to compete for top talent your team needs data to monitor and maximize the impact of their efforts. Creating a well-thought-out hiring dashboard gives you easy access to all the data you need to understand how your team's resources and time are being allocated and allows you to see the impact you’re having on meeting your hiring goals and larger company mission.  

In this third installment of our Ultimate Recruiting Operations Dashboard series, we discuss the “recruiting health” dashboard. We’ll show you how to tailor your hiring dashboard, 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. 

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 Executive Summary Dashboard

• The Pipeline Composition Dashboard

• The Recruiting Team Productivity Dashboard

The recruiting health dashboard

The recruiting health dashboard is aimed at assessing the efficiency and success of your current hiring process. This dashboard provides a more granular look at how your team’s time and resources are allocated and whether or not that’s moving the needle in your hiring goals. 

A recruiting health dashboard makes it easy to have more data-driven conversations with your team, find out what’s working within your hiring funnel, identify potential roadblocks, and make pivots before they impact your team’s performance.

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 recruiting dashboard:

• All metrics in the essential hiring dashboard

• Total hires by recruiter

• Time to hire by recruiter and location

• Current open jobs by recruiter and location

• Total hires by office

• Average time to hire by office

• Current job openings by office

• Average time to fill by department and location

• Job time open by recruiter

• Referral stats

• Outreach stats

• Time in stage by candidate stage

• Passthrough rate by stage

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

Disclaimer: Metrics like total hires, time to hire, job openings, rejection reasons, etc. aren’t described below, but they are still important to this dashboard. More information on these metrics can be found in our Essential Hiring Dashboard article.

Total hires by recruiter

Adding total hires by recruiter to your hiring dashboard makes it easy to visualize the performance of your recruiting team. However, when looking at this metric, it’s important to make sure you’re doing an apples-to-apples comparison of the roles each recruiter is tasked with hiring (i.e., same department, experience level, etc.). For example, a recruiter hiring for an entry-level sales role will likely have a much easier time filling their reqs than a recruiter hiring for a senior product designer. Or, alternatively, if all recruiters are responsible for hiring across similar levels, departments, etc. you can use this metric to see which recruiters are doing well and which ones may need some help—there may be some messaging certain recruiters are using that is increasing offer accepts and should be adopted across the team. 

Median time to hire by recruiter

This is another metric that is important to include in a recruiting health dashboard as it can be an indicator of recruiter performance as it relates to speed, but again, it needs to be looked at through the lens of what type of roles each recruiter is responsible for hiring. 

Current open jobs by recruiter

Looking at the number of current job openings per recruiter will give you an idea of each team member’s workload and allow you to distribute new reqs fairly among them. This will ensure that none of your recruiters become burnt out by too many job reqs and none are left with no reqs and feel abandoned.  

Total hires by office (location)

Paying attention to hires by office provides visibility into which offices are succeeding in their hiring goals and how remote hiring stacks up against office-based hiring. These insights can help you plan your remote/hybrid/in-office strategy and determine the best allocation for your recruiting team

Median time to hire by office (location)

For roles where the location can be flexible, it’s important to keep track of where you can make your fastest hires. Including time to hire by office gives you an internal benchmark into hiring speeds across various locations, and could be a useful data point for recruiter productivity. 

Current job openings by office (location)

It’s always a good idea to be a strong business partner to Finance, HR, and Facilities. Getting a sense of where your current job openings are located can help you provide more insight into the downstream impacts on things like office space, manager-to-employee ratios, remote employee experience, etc. From a TA perspective, this can also help you plan where to add your next recruiter(s). 

Median time to fill by department

When looking at the median time to hire at a company level, it’s hard to drill into the details and understand exactly where the opportunities lie across your team. Most teams have vastly different interview processes, hiring managers, and interviewers, so getting a sense of the breakdown is hugely important. Median rather than average will also cut out some edge cases giving you a better overall picture of how long it is taking to fill a role. 

Median time to fill by office (location)

Looking at time to fill by office, especially when paired with industry market data can help you set expectations for your business partners (like Finance and HR), help you plan out a longer-term recruiting strategy, and help you drive influence on locations for specific roles.  

Job time open by recruiter

A common occurrence across larger recruiting teams is that silos tend to form and information is not as easily shared. Looking at these numbers can give you insights into opportunities for improvement across your team and who on your team may be great to partner with for a training or a best practice share. 

Referrals in process

It’s no secret that employee referrals are an extremely important source of hire. However, there’s always room for improvement in this process, especially when it comes to providing a better experience for referrals (and also the referrers). Adding referral information to your hiring dashboard gives you an easy way to get insight into the referrals in the process, follow up and make sure they are all in good standing which ultimately ties into a strong employment brand. 

Outreach stats

Including outreach stats in your hiring dashboard will allow you to visualize your team’s sourcing efforts and how they drive impact toward organizational goals. Looking at your teams’ outreach stats, you can identify which outreach campaigns are driving the best hiring outcomes and which ones may need a tune-up. You can also use this data to make the business case for how outbound efforts are directly contributing to company growth to ensure your team gets proper resource allocation and investment. 

Time in interview stage

Now more than ever, this is an incredibly important metric. In a tight labor market, candidates are much more likely to drop out of your hiring process if things are moving too slowly. Adding time in interview stage will allow you to visualize exactly how much time candidates are spending at each stage and where bottlenecks may be in your process. This will inevitably lead to lower drop-off rates and better overall candidate experience.

Passthrough rate by stage

Similar to time in stage, including passthrough rate by stage in your hiring dashboard, will allow you to spot potential roadblocks within your hiring process that may be impacting your ability to hit your goals. For example, if you’re seeing a significant drop in passthrough rates from pre-interview to a phone interview, this may signal a misalignment between the recruiter and hiring manager in the education, skills, etc. needed for the role, and a simple re-calibration may be the fix. 

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 easy-to-read hiring dashboards is the key to better understanding your recruiting data and getting buy-in from key stakeholders that are critical to your role. Building a robust recruiting health hiring dashboard makes it easy to have more data-driven conversations with your team, monitor their performance, and remove any potential roadblocks keeping you from meeting your hiring goals. 

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