We know how gathering data around all your hiring activities and making sense of it is challenging. Juggling between different spreadsheets, choosing which reports to prioritize, and attending to stakeholders' demands can drain the best of recruiters. 

Manual efforts will not generate accurate results since the data is scattered. Using clean data drives 70% more revenue as compared to bad data, and you need dashboards to improve data quality. This is why you must have a hiring dashboard for a holistic view of your efforts so you can transform data into actionable intelligence. 

This article explains the steps to creating an actionable hiring dashboard for your organization. 

What is a hiring dashboard, and why do you need one? 

A hiring dashboard is a visualization tool that shows recruitment metrics and KPIs in an easily digestible format. You can access real-time data on crucial areas such as number of applicants, candidate source, time to fill, gender analysis within your recruitment funnel. 

Here’s an example of a hiring recruitment dashboard: 

Source

Some common aspects of a hiring dashboard include details on applicants, budgets, campaigns, and successful hires. A detailed dashboard can help your team focus on achieving recruitment goals such as reducing recruitment costs or improving candidate quality. 

These are some undeniable benefits of using a hiring dashboard: 

• Identify bottlenecks: Since hiring dashboards are presented visually, you can identify problems easily even if you don’t have a technical background. You can also see future issues and trends within your hiring funnel to make data-driven decisions. 
• Improve recruitment strategy: With a hiring dashboard, you can see each recruitment stage, which helps you refocus on lagging areas. For example, if job boards are the most effective for helping you source high-quality candidates, you can double down on what works. 
• Better scalability and flexibility: Regardless of how much your recruitment activities increase, a hiring dashboard can accommodate your growth. For instance, if your company suddenly has high-volume hiring needs, there’s a need to track more applicant data than ever. With a dashboard, you can make room for such scenarios without affecting your normal workflow. 
• Enhanced collaboration: Dashboards provide a centralized location for you to access all your data. This way, your feedback and communication can be better aligned. 
• Efficient resource allocation: Hiring dashboards help you understand where to channel your human and monetary resources. In a case where a particular source like social media is more effective for reaching your ideal clients, your dashboard helps you identify such occurrences. Also, it informs your next move on how to allocate your budget to different recruiting sources to know the areas to double your effort. 

How to create an actionable hiring dashboard 

With adequate know-how of building hiring dashboards, you can generate correct results that can help you avoid wasted efforts. 

1. Identify company goals and objectives

When creating a recruitment dashboard, you need to consider how it affects your company as a whole and how the visualized data will help solve nagging problems. What aspects of your recruitment activities need extra focus to help you reach your goals? 

Three major dashboard design approaches are operational, analytical, and hybrid. 

• Operational dashboards: These allow you to access data on time-specific issues such as vacant roles, upcoming deadlines, the number of job applications, and a general overview of the talent pipeline. 
• Analytical dashboards: Such hiring dashboards help you draw actionable insights from your company's data. You can recognize recurring trends and draw comparisons between different datasets. For example, a bar chart showing how candidates go through the recruitment process allows you to identify issues that can cause hiccups. 
• Hybrid: The hybrid approach combines operational and analytical dashboard features. With Kula ATS, you can access a good mix of both through its reporting and analytics features designed to help you reach your goals. 

2. Ask the right questions from stakeholders

To avoid measuring the wrong data, collaborate with hiring managers and top leadership members to determine their preferences. Brainstorm questions that your team would like to access instant answers for. 

Here are some hypothetical questions you can explore when creating your hiring dashboard: 

• How many vacant positions are available in the organization?
• How long does it take to fill a role? 
• How many applications were sent based on the department? 
• At what point do candidates drop off in the pipeline? 
• How long do successful candidates remain as employees? 
• How many applicants receive an offer, and which of them accept or reject it? 
• What are the most successful hiring sources that lead to more qualified candidates? 

These questions will allow you to access operational and analytical data to help you make better hiring decisions. 

3. Choose metrics to include in the dashboard

Behind every question you ask during the hiring process is a recruiting metric that you need to measure. Ensure that you focus on the relevant metrics to your business to avoid wasted effort. 

Metrics such as time-to-hire, candidate quality, number of applicants, cost-per-hire, candidate source, and offer acceptance rate are important metrics to track. 

With Kula ATS's powerful analytics feature, you can automate the process of tracking most of these metrics. This tool can also help you track the effectiveness of your sourcing efforts, track referrals, measure DEI metrics, and visualize the data of your recruiting funnel. 

4. Compile data across different sources

Centralize all the data from your job boards, experience surveys, training, and onboarding process. 

Kula makes this easy. You can track candidate sources across multiple channels using filterable analytic dashboards. You can also manage your InMails on LinkedIn and email interactions and download candidate profiles to enhance your recruitment process. 

Instead of having your data scattered across different channels, Kula ATS helps you focus better by providing a holistic view of your activities. 

5. Visualize data for easy presentation

Selecting the proper format for your dashboard is ideal if you're looking to compare results or group data based on category. 

Here are different scenarios and the data formats that apply: 

• Pie charts: This format is ideal for scenarios where the proportions can be calculated to 100%. You can use this to measure the percentage of applicants from a particular source. 
• Bar charts: You can break data into related groups based on common characteristics or even specific timeframes. For example, you measure the number of applicants you attract based on each job role. 
• Line charts: A line chart helps you see gradual developments over time. For instance, you can track the number of interviews your organization had within a year to gain better insights. 

Instead of relying on Excel sheets to visualize your data, Kula ATS shows current and historical pipeline analytics based on your preferred format to ease your presentations and data interpretation process. 

You can also download your organization's in-product reports with a single click using Kula ATS. 

6. Select the right tools to build a dashboard

You can use various tools to build a dashboard for your organization, and each option has pros and cons. 

• Applicant tracking system (ATS): With an ATS such as Kula, you can create dashboards with an analytic feature based on existing data. It integrates with numerous platforms so you can easily access diverse recruitment data. 
• Spreadsheet programs: The drawback of relying on Excel, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice Calc to visualize data is that you must spend time customizing your dashboards and juggling between different sheets to gain accurate results. 

7. Take action based on your findings

Even the best dashboard is only helpful if it motivates you to take action. You must use your findings to track your current data and inform your future decisions. The dashboard will help you to keep every team member updated about the insights behind the actions you take. 

Best practices for creating an effective hiring dashboard

How to ensure data accuracy

Data can quickly become messy if not handled properly, making it challenging to ensure the accuracy of your results. This is why you have to be conscious of the information you put into your dashboard to avoid possible inconsistencies. 

Also, your team has to set out time for data quality audits to identify mistakes, and understand your data better. This helps you identify possible issues such as volume, distribution errors, and relational issues within your data. Once this is settled, you can gain a better understanding of your visualized data. 

How to apply color theory

Color theory captures how colors complement each other and how they help you communicate your data. When color theory is applied correctly, it assists you in highlighting important information and enhances data comprehension.

Here are a few factors to consider when applying color theory to your dashboard: 

• Consider your industry standards and the colors that promote visual credibility.  
• Understand the overall personality of your organization to guide your color choices and ensure alignment of dashboard design to company image. 
• Explore the emotional components behind the colors you choose to easily capture the message you’re passing across. 
• Avoid using too many colors that can cause visual clutter in your dashboard design. 
• Strike a balance between bold and neutral colors to make core information stand out while prioritizing visual coherence. 

Centralize your hiring data using Kula ATS

A hiring dashboard enables data-driven recruiting, which helps you speed up the hiring process, reduce hiring costs, and eliminate bias to achieve a more objective approach. A centralized data platform is essential as a recruiter committed to helping your team succeed. 

Kula ATS helps you to automate your hiring process and extract analytics across your core recruitment channels while relying on impressive visuals. The reporting system also allows you to access real-time data on headcount plans, time-to-hire, and even compliance reports. 

Book a demo today to learn how Kula ATS can ease your recruiting process.