What should be on a Recruiting Dashboard

I grew up watching Star Trek with my grandfather on Saturday afternoons. Roughly 60% of the episodes usually took place on the bridge. The captain sat in a chair in the middle of the room with team members at each station with streams of data on their touch screens. One station was responsible for monitoring the ship’s shields, another for analyzing potential enemy data and another to analyze the planet they were set to explore. When a situation got intense, you’d see each team member read out their data points consecutively while the captain took in the information to make a decision. 

The captain of the ship did not have the luxury of time to gather all of the information, put it in an excel worksheet and attempt to make a life or death decision for the crew. They had to have the right information, in real time, to answer the question at hand. 

The goal for today’s talent leader is to leverage the various data points at their disposal to make a data informed decision. We have some traditional metrics like number of hires and time to fill but there is so much more information for us to gather and analyze to become the talent leader our clients need. 

Many  talent leaders face the same battle the US military did in 2004. There is a ton of information, mostly siloed and hard to access when needed. Creating a data driven talent organization takes time and focus, just like it did for the task force in Iraq. 

The first step is determining what business questions you need to answer daily, monthly or off the cuff. This is a critical step often skipped but I would caution you to take the time to think it through. A good best practice is to pull the key stakeholders (business leaders, HR, or other interested parties) into a design thinking session. In the session, you’ll hear from your client the information they want to see and the timing. It’s also a good time to ask how they want to see the information? Do they want it in tables or visualized?

My dashboard “favorites” are based on the Sprint Recruiting Methodology. Here are a couple of metrics I track on my dashboard: 

• Average time open. I usually have  this in a numeric banner over a pie chart breaking the metrics down into categories: <30 days, <45 days, 45+ days. 
• Funnel Metrics
  • How many candidates in recruiter screening versus the number of openings? I typically like to see the number of screenings at or above 2.5 times the number of roles. 
  • How many candidates in a technical interview? This is the next stage in the funnel so I want to have 1.5 times the number of roles in this step. 
  • How many candidates in a hiring manager interview? For this stage, I use 1.5 as well.
  • Offers
  • Pending Acceptance
  • “Done” aka “Hired” 
  • I also track this in a day over day chart to measure progress and anticipate issues before they happen. Over time, you learn to almost predict how you will end each sprint based on the numbers reported. 
• Number of positions in each stage: Sourcing, Screening, Interview, etc. I also track these daily to see progress and where I need to dig in during my one on ones. 
• Number of positions by department and/or client 
• Trending time to fill over the last 90 days
• Number of points assigned versus won
• Number of points in each stage of the process: interview, offer, etc. 
• Pipeline statistics: I am a huge proponent of having a pipeline of vetted candidates ready for roles when they open. My dashboard shows how many we have in each pool and the last touchpoint. 

This is the first page of my dashboard. I have drop downs which allow me to drill down to the recruiter or department if needed. I find this to be the most important page of the dashboard. I can quickly assess the vitals of my organization and plan my day accordingly. If I notice there is not a lot of movement on a particular set of positions, especially if they are deemed critical and assigned points during the sprint, I will make it a point to schedule time with the recruiter to understand what’s going on and if there are obstacles I need to address for them. 

The dashboard is also helpful when meeting with senior leaders. In my current and previous roles, we would bid on work. I leveraged my dashboard to analyze the talent pools to help my business leaders know what type of work they should go after, based on the number of vetted candidates we had in a pool waiting for an opportunity. Before I created the dashboard, business leaders would go and bid on work, only to lose it because talent acquisition was unable to get the role filled in time. The dashboard allowed talent acquisition and the business to sync on what the business could fulfill and recognize revenue.

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Running a recruiting organization without a proper dashboard is like flying a plane without the proper control panel. Flying blind is not how you want to manage your team and they deserve better than that. A great recruiting leader is made better when they have access to the right metrics, at the right time, for the right discussion.