Organizational Wellness

An HR Guide to Recruiting Dashboards: Metrics, Building Templates & Examples

Last Updated Feb 21, 2025

Time to read: 10 minutes

Numbers don’t just crunch—they speak volumes. In recruitment, they reveal triumphs, missed chances, and those pesky inefficiencies that quietly drain your resources.

But they need a little help work their magic: Without a smart dashboard to decode them, those numbers might as well be whispers lost in the wind.

Savvy HR know this. They see recruiting dashboards as their secret weapon for smarter, faster, and more strategic hiring. And they’re not wrong. With the average cost of a new hire hitting $4,700 (thanks, SHRM 2022 benchmarking report), having data at your fingertips isn’t just savvy—it’s essential.

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What Is a Recruiting Dashboard, and Why Does it Matter?

A recruiting dashboard is a tool that helps you stay on top of your talent acquisition. It provides real-time visibility into your hiring process by giving you key metrics and analytics, all in a birds-eye view. It transforms raw recruitment data into helpful insights, allowing HR teams and managers to make better recruitment decisions.

Think of it as your command center for hiring. Instead of relying on gut feelings or scattered spreadsheets, a well-designed recruiting dashboard lets you see clearly what’s working, what isn’t, and where you need to focus your efforts. This data-driven approach can help you optimize everything from candidate sourcing to final negotiations.

Essential Recruiting Metrics & KPIs

Although there are many helpful recruiting HR metrics, a dashboard should only have the most important ones. Here are the ones most HR pros keep on their dashboards:

Time-to-Hire

Time-to-hire measures how long it takes to fill a position from the moment a job requisition is approved to when a candidate accepts an offer. This metric is one of the most important ones to keep track of during the recruitment process because a lengthy hiring process can lead to lost candidates and increased costs.

How to calculate it: Count the number of days between job requisition approval and offer acceptance for each job opening and find the average.
Target range: The average time-to-hire rate is 31 days, according to a Pinpoint report. Aim for 30 days or shorter to be above average.
Improvement strategies: Implement automated screening tools for initial candidate reviews, establish clear interview workflows to reduce scheduling delays, and create timelines for hiring decisions.

Cost-per-Hire

Cost-per-hire is the total investment required to fill a position, including both internal and external costs. This comprehensive metric helps organizations understand the true financial impact of their recruiting efforts and make decisions based on data. By tracking cost-to-hire, you can identify inefficiencies in your recruitment process, justify budget requests, and demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of your hiring initiatives.

To calculate cost-per-hire, you’ll want to add up all the external costs and internal costs. These typically include:

External costs: Job board subscriptions, recruitment agency fees, advertising expenses, recruitment tools, and technology, employer branding initiatives, and career participation fees.
Internal costs: Recruiter salaries and time, hiring manager involvement hours, interview team time investment, onboarding resources, and training materials.

To improve your cost-per-hire, try developing a strong internal referral program. Your team is sometimes your best network, and they just might know the right candidate for your position. You can also invest in recruitment technology that automates repetitive tasks. And regularly analyze how effective each sourcing channel is to optimize spending.

Offer Acceptance Rate

Offer acceptance rate shows the percentage of candidates who accept your job offers. It’s a very strong indicator of your ability to close deals with your desired candidates. This metric can tell you about your brand strength, compensation competitiveness, and overall candidate experience.

A low acceptance rate might be a sign that there’s a misalignment between candidate expectations and your offers, which means that it might be time to look at the competitiveness of your total compensation package.

How to calculate it: (Number of accepted offers / Total number of offers made) x 100. Track this metric quarterly to identify trends and seasonal variations. For example, people tend to look for jobs at the beginning of the calendar year, according to an Indeed report.

To improve your offer acceptance rate, you can focus on developing competitive compensation packages. This includes more than just a salary, as workers care about benefits as well. As revealed in Wellhub’s State of Work-Life Wellness 2024 eport, 93% of workers consider their workplace wellbeing to be just as important as their salaries.

If your benefits offerings aren’t keeping up with what the competition is doing, then you might end up with a lower offer acceptance rate.

Candidate Source

Tracking your candidate source helps you optimize your recruitment marketing spend by identifying which channels deliver the best results. Understanding where your successful hires come from allows you to make informed decisions about resource allocation and recruitment strategy. These data helps you build a more efficient and cost-effective hiring process so you can reach the right talent pools.

Common candidate sources: Think of your careers page, employee referrals, professional social networks,job boards, career fairs, recruitment agencies, and university partnerships.

To improve your candidate sources, you’ll want to analyze which channels are your highest-performing ones. Then, double down on them. You might even consider dropping underperforming sources and just focusing on the ones that have delivered successful applicants.

Quality of Hire

This metric measures the long-term value a new employee brings to your organization, making it perhaps the most important yet challenging metric to track. Quality of hire goes beyond initial recruitment success to evaluate how well new hires perform, integrate, and contribute to organizational success.

Although it’s more difficult to measure than other metrics, quality of hire is an indispensable metric for your recruitment strategy. Remember that better quality hires lead to improved team performance, reduced turnover costs, increased productivity, and higher overall employee engagement.

The last thing you want is to have to hire a bad candidate that you’ll have to replace shortly after, as it can cost up to three times their salary to replace a single employee, according to a 2022 SHRM study.

How to measure it: Combine multiple data points, including performance reviews, manager feedback surveys, peer evaluations, productivity metrics, and new hire satisfaction surveys.

Recruiting Dashboard Examples

The beauty of dashboards is that they can be customized depending on what you’re trying to focus on. For example, maybe your company is going through an expansion mode and your main priority is to lower the time-to-hire ratio as much as possible. Or maybe you’re going through a financial cutting phase and want to get lean on the cost-per-hire.

You can structure your dashboards to highlight different parts of the recruitment process. For example, here’s a general recruitment dashboard template:

Metric	Current	Target	Previous Quarter	YoY Change
Time-to-hire	38 days	30 days	42 days	-9.5%
Cost-per-hire	$4,200	$3,500	$4,600	-8.7%
Offer acceptance rate	78%	85%	72%	+8.3%
Quality score	3.8/5	4/5	3.6/5	+5.5%

On the other hand, let’s say you really want to double down on your best candidate source channels. For that, we can create a recruiting dashboard that organizes your candidates by source to help you identify the best-performing channels:

Channel	Hires	Cost-per-hire	Time-to-hire	Quality score
LinkedIn	14	$4,800	42 days	4.1/5
Referrals	22	$2,200	28 days	4.4/5
Job boards	18	$3,600	35 days	3.7/5
Agency	9	$7,200	45 days	4.2/5
Direct	12	$1,800	32 days	3.9/5
Average	15	$3,920	26 days	4.1/5

Building Your Ideal Recruiting Dashboard

The first step in creating an effective recruiting dashboard is to choose the right tools for your organization’s size, budget, and technical capacity. For smaller organizations or those just getting started with data tracking, Excel or Google Sheets provide flexible and cost-effective solutions. Although they require more manual data entry, they offer complete control over customization.

More established organizations might benefit from dedicated HR analytics software, which offers automated data collection and advanced visualization options. For example, Paradox AI is a new platform dedicated to creating recruitment dashboards with the help of AI analytics. BambooHR is an established HR software that offers candidate-tracking solutions in addition to other HR functions.

Whichever option you choose, you must confirm that the dashboard comes with excellent visualizations. Bar charts work best for comparing metrics across departments or time periods, while line graphs can show trends in time-to-hire or cost-per-hire over time.

Funnel charts are great for visualizing your recruitment pipeline, showing you how candidates progress from application to hire. This is important to track, as over 90% of applicants don’t complete their job applications, according to an SHRM study.

How to Build a Recruiting Dashboard in Excel

Building a dashboard from scratch is a popular choice for those just getting started. Although it might seem daunting, you can create a powerful tool for tracking your hiring metrics with a systematic approach. Here’s a simple way to to build your own recruiting dashboard in Excel:

Set up your data structure by creating three distinct sheets: One for raw data entry, one for calculations and pivot tables, and one for your final dashboard to display.
Create standardized data entry forms in your raw data sheet, including columns for metrics like application date, source, hiring stage, and time-in-stage.
Build pivot tables in your calculation sheet to summarize key metrics. You can include tables for time-to-hire by department, source effectiveness, and offer acceptance rates by position level.
Design your dashboard sheet with a clear layout. Place your most important metrics at the top, and group related information together. Leave space for both current metrics and trend analysis.
Add dynamic charts that automatically update as new data is entered. Consider using combo charts to show bot actual versus target metrics in one visualization.
Incorporate conditional formatting to highlight metrics that fall outside of acceptable ranges. For example, use red highlighting when time-to-hire exceeds 45 days or green when offer acceptance rates are above target.
Create a refresh protocol by adding buttons or instructions for updating dashboard data. Include clear instructions on how to maintain the dashboard.
Test your dashboard thoroughly by entering sample data and confirming that all formulas, pivot tables, and charts update correctly. Have your coworkers test it as well to see what they think!

Advanced Dashboard Techniques

Once you’ve been playing with your first recruiting dashboard for a while, you’ll undoubtedly start looking for ways to maximize its power even further. If you feel like you’re at that stage already, try incorporating some of these advanced dashboard techniques:

Predictive Analytics

Modern recruiting dashboards can help you predict your future hiring needs. You can use these dashboards to forecast recruitment needs for upcoming quarters by analyzing historical data along with business growth patterns. You can look for patterns in seasonal hiring, department growth rates, and turnover trends to make more accurate hiring predictions.

Integrating With Your Applicant Tracking System ATS

A dashboard connected to your ATS can provide real-time insights without manual data entry. This integration allows you to track candidates from first contact to hire, automatically updating metrics as candidates move through your pipeline. Look for ATS systems that offer API connections or built-in analytics capabilities.

Using Data to Improve Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI)

Your current dashboard can be a powerful tool for making your company more diverse. You can use it to track demographic data throughout the hiring funnel to identify where diverse candidates might be dropping out of your process. You can monitor metrics like:

Diversity of candidate pools at each stage
Pass-through rates by demographic group
Source effectiveness for diverse hiring
Interview panel representation
Offer acceptance rates across different groups

Transform Your Recruitment Through Data-Driven Dashboards

They say you can’t improve what you don’t measure, and improving your recruitment systems begins with understanding what your metrics are like. A recruitment dashboard — through recruiting dashboard templates or a recruiting dashboard Excel form — can help you easily track and visualize the most important recruitment key performance indicators, including time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, offer acceptance rate, and more.

And once you’re on top of all of your metrics, you’ll want to focus on improving your total compensation package to make more competitive job offers. This includes offering more wellness benefits in your organization, which can help both attract new talent and retain current talent. As revealed in Wellhub’s Return on Wellbeing 2024 report, 83% of HR leaders categorize their wellbeing program as ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ important to talent acquisition.

Speak with a Wellhub Wellbeing Specialist today to see how we can launch a wellbeing program that helps supercharge your recruitment efforts!