Creating a recruitment dashboard is crucial for a company’s HR Managers. When effectively developed, it allows them to have a clear overview and simplify their candidate selection process. To assist you in building an optimal recruitment dashboard, here are 6 essential tips that will guide you through the process:
What is a recruitment dashboard?
A recruitment dashboard is a key tool for HR managers and the company. It offers numerous advantages in a recruitment process.
By definition, a recruitment dashboard is like a digital dashboard for HR managers. It’s a tool that gathers all the important information about a company’s recruitment process. This visual interface provides an overview of applications, selection process stages, and key performance indicators, all presented in the form of graphs, tables, and summary data. It clearly shows how many candidates have applied, where they are in the process, and how the recruitment is generally progressing. Thanks to this recruitment board, recruiters and HR managers can easily measure the effectiveness of different recruitment stages, identify gaps, and make informed decisions to optimise their selection process.
Importance of a recruitment dashboard
The dashboard can reveal trends, spot obstacles, and help HR managers develop a more optimal strategy. Properly designed, it:
- Improve operational efficiency;
- Save resources by prioritising important and urgent issues;
- Visually present all necessary data to accelerate decision-making;
- Prevent cognitive biases by basing the strategy on real and regularly updated data.
But for this to be possible, it’s crucial to choose relevant performance indicators that inform you on the accuracy of your recruitment process, and whether you’re on track to hit your goals.
Build an effective recruitment dashboard by following these 6 key tips
Generally, recruitment needs vary from one company to another so there’s no universal recruitment dashboard model that will suit all organisations. The benefit of this is that you can create a personalised, bespoke dashboard to suit your specific needs. To help you achieve this, here are some guidelines to follow:
1 – Define clear and precise objectives
Currently, what are the most pressing challenges within your recruitment team? What obstacles are you looking to solve immediately? The answers to these questions might include things like having a long time-to-hire, trouble scheduling interviews efficiently, low applicant numbers, poor NPS scores, high drop-out rates. Once you’ve got your answers, your objectives will be clear: improve interview planning, attract more candidates, enhance their experience, or reduce dropouts.
2 – Select relevant performance indicators
For example, if you have a high dropout rate, it would be wise to monitor conversion rates through the interview process. This will provide insight into where your drop-out rates happen most frequently and conduct further analysis to identify the specific problem. To detect potential problems, there are several recruitment KPIs to follow:
- The time needed to hire;
- The cost per hire;
- The quality of recruitments;
- The efficiency of the recruitment funnel;
- The number of applications received;
- The source of candidates;
- The satisfaction of candidates.
These measures provide a complete view of the performance of your hiring campaign and allow you to make informed decisions to improve it.
3 – Find data sources
It is essential to know where the data you want to analyse comes from and how to integrate it into your recruitment dashboard. Regarding the choice of data, it will depend on the key performance indicators (KPI) and objectives you have previously defined. You can obtain this data from various sources, including:
- Your accounting software;
- Your enterprise resource planning system (ERP), etc.
As for how to import this data into your recruitment dashboard, it will depend on the tool you use.
4 – Choose the right tools
Half the work is done when you select the appropriate tool. Whether using Excel, Google Sheets, or software specifically designed for human resources management, the choice of tool should be based on your specific needs. In wanting to choose, you can consider the following features:
- A user-friendly and pleasant visual interface that simplifies understanding of information for everyone;
- The ability to automatically generate reports for the dashboard after a single setup;
- The possibility to schedule automatic report sending to stakeholders on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis.
5 – Opt for an appropriate design approach
When designing a recruitment dashboard, you have two options: customise it according to your specific needs or download an existing template. You can choose an analytical approach or a reporting-focused one. Most prefer the analytical approach, crucial for internal evaluations and decision-making. On the other hand, the reporting approach focuses on communication between departments. The latter highlights specific information to keep stakeholders informed about the statuses of vacant positions, overall performance, and budget issues. In most cases, a mix of these two types of data visualisation is ideal.
6 – Design the recruitment dashboard
Once you have all the necessary data to create your recruitment dashboard, the next step is to select the appropriate way to represent it. The goal here is to find a simple way to present complex information, and this is achieved through clear visuals (graphs, shapes, tables). Google spreadsheets and Excel sheets offer a variety of graphs for data visualisation – and your task is to choose the model most suited to your needs.
Following these steps, you will have an optimal recruitment dashboard that will allow your team to analyse data and help your company succeed in its recruitment process.
