A Perfect Recruiting Dashboard
A Recruiting Dashboard makes analyzing all of your staffing activities easy and crystal clear. Reports have their uses and can help you make informed decisions, but dashboards deliver immediately actionable business intelligence.
A recruiting dashboard software platform provides a summary of what is happening in all areas of your business and specifically those areas that matter most to you. So if you are a recruiter, it can help you analyze the status of your job orders, average time-to-fill, candidate engagement and more – all in one screen to help keep tabs on your performance. This can not only help you take appropriate actions but it can help you predict what will happen in certain scenarios.
Overall, recruiting dashboard software:
- Provides a graphical representation of your data and makes it easy to see highlights and identify trends or issues
- Removes the data clutter and gives you the intelligence you need to take decisive action
- Reduces decision-making time
Now the question is what is a perfect recruiting dashboard? Here is what we think:
- It should answer the most important questions about your business.
The reason why recruiting dashboards are in place is to answer the difficult questions for your business. To put this in operational language, it refers to measuring the key metrics of your business.
For a staffing and recruiting firm, these key metrics can be time-to-hire, quality of hire, cost-per-hire, applicants per job, channel efficiency, candidate engagement, etc. Most of these can be operational reporting visualized in a dashboard for more immediate impact. If your business has an analytical maturity to consume predictive and statistical information as well, it would make the dashboard even more meaningful.
- It should use the right representation of the data.
Most of us have experienced that an inappropriate chart used to represent data can lead to incorrect interpretation and flawed decision making. This is why choosing the right representation is the key to creating a perfect dashboard.
For example:
- To analyze your revenue month on month, you will use a basic column chart
- To understand the ethnic or gender ratio of applicants for a job order, you would use a pie chart
- To identify how your candidates, move through the recruitment process, you will use a funnel chart
…and so on.
- It should follow the right order of metrics.
A perfect recruitment dashboard should serve data in the format that users can interpret simply and quickly. This means that the most critical piece of information should be shown first. For a typical staffing firm, a recruiting dashboard will start with recruiter activity showing applicants and placed candidates by every recruiter. This can be followed by job applicants by stage, or job orders by stage, and so on. This again would depend on your role at the organization. A dashboard for a recruiter would differ drastically from that used by the CEO of a staffing firm.
- It should be accurate.
Last but not the least, this is an obvious but really important element of creating a perfect dashboard. Inaccurate data can be highly misleading and can lead to losses. So, if your data is in spreadsheets and you are creating a dashboard from there, it is high time you moved away from this to a real time reporting/dashboard solution. If you are feeding data from your ATS to another reporting tool, it is also not advisable because you have to constantly monitor that the data fed into the reporting and dashboards solution is accurate, and often legacy reports are not updated to reflect changes that may be applied to the business operations from time to time.
The best practice would be to use an ATS that offers the flexible reporting capability that your business will require time and again. An ATS should be able to support the creation of dashboards to help you analyze all of your recruiting activities on the go easily and quickly.
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Creating a dashboard using staff recruitment software may sound difficult but with the right technology, it can be simple and can change the way your recruiters work, as they can retrieve and display the information they need without needing IT involvement. The easier it is for users to create and modify their own reports and dashboards, the more they will be encouraged to use the system fully to help manage their own time and resources more effectively, and to make sound data-driven decisions.
