How to Create a Recruitment Dashboard in Google Sheets with AI
Hiring is a messy process filled with scattered data - candidate info in your Applicant Tracking System (ATS), sourcing stats in a separate spreadsheet, and hiring manager feedback somewhere in your email. A recruitment dashboard can pull this chaos into one clear picture, and building it in Google Sheets makes it accessible for your whole team. This guide will walk you through creating a powerful recruitment dashboard, showing you how to leverage AI to handle the heavy lifting, turning complex data into simple, actionable insights.
Why Bother with a Recruitment Dashboard in Google Sheets?
Before jumping into formulas and charts, it’s worth understanding why a dashboard is a game-changer for any recruiting team. It’s not just about making pretty graphs, it’s about making smarter, faster, and more effective hiring decisions. Moving beyond gut feelings to data-backed strategy can fundamentally improve how you attract and hire talent.
Get a Bird's-Eye View of Your Hiring Funnel
A recruitment dashboard visualizes your entire hiring funnel, from the initial application to the final offer acceptance. This immediately helps you spot bottlenecks. Are a ton of candidates dropping off after the first interview? Is the "hiring manager review" stage taking weeks? Seeing the flow of candidates laid out clearly allows you to pinpoint exactly where your process is slow or inefficient, giving you a clear focus for improvement.
Track Key Recruitment Metrics (KPIs)
Your dashboard is the perfect place to track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that tell the story of your recruitment effectiveness. Some of the most crucial metrics include:
Time to Fill: The total number of days from when a job requisition is opened to when a candidate accepts the offer. This KPI measures the overall efficiency of your recruiting process.
Time to Hire: The number of days between a candidate's application and their offer acceptance. This metric reflects the candidate experience and the speed of your hiring team.
Cost per Hire: The total cost of recruiting (ad spend, recruiter salaries, software costs) divided by the number of hires. This helps you understand and manage your recruiting budget.
Source of Hire: Which channels (LinkedIn, referrals, company career page, etc.) are bringing in not just the most candidates, but the most hired candidates. This is critical for optimizing your sourcing strategy and budget.
Offer Acceptance Rate: The percentage of candidates who accept a job offer. A low rate might indicate issues with compensation, company culture, or the interview process itself.
Improve Collaboration and Transparency
A well-maintained dashboard acts as a single source of truth for everyone involved in the hiring process. Hiring managers can check the status of their open roles without sending another "any updates?" email. Leadership can see progress against hiring goals at a glance. It reduces back-and-forth communication, aligns expectations, and makes recruiting a more transparent team effort.
Step 1: Gather and Organize Your Recruiting Data
A dashboard is only as good as the data powering it. This foundational step involves figuring out where your information lives and structuring it in a clean, consistent way so Google Sheets (and any AI tools) can make sense of it.
Identify Your Data Sources
First, list out all the places your recruiting data comes from. Common sources include:
An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) like Greenhouse, Lever, or Ashby
Spreadsheets used for manual candidate tracking
Google Forms for application intake or interviewer feedback
Exported reports from job boards like LinkedIn or Indeed
Your goal is to consolidate this information into a single 'database' sheet.
Structure Your Google Sheet
Create a new Google Sheet. Rename the first tab to something like "Recruiting Data" or "Raw Data." This sheet will act as your central database. Set up columns for every data point you want to track. Consistency is crucial here.
Here’s a great starting structure for your columns:
Requisition ID: A unique ID for each open position.
Job Title: The name of the role (e.g., "Senior Product Manager").
Department: The team the role belongs to (e.g., "Marketing," "Engineering").
Hiring Manager: The person who will manage the new hire.
Recruiter: The person responsible for filling the role.
Candidate Name: The applicant's name.
Application Date: The date the candidate applied.
Source: How the candidate found you (e.g., "LinkedIn," "Employee Referral," "Indeed").
Current Stage: The candidate's current step in the process (e.g., "Applied," "Phone Screen," "Interview 1," "Offer," "Hired").
Offer Date: The date an offer was extended.
Start Date: The new hire's planned start date.
Reason for Rejection: If a candidate was declined or withdrew (e.g., "Not a Culture Fit," "Accepted Another Offer").
Pro Tip: To avoid typos and maintain consistency, use Data Validation to create dropdown menus for columns like "Current Stage," "Source," and "Department." This prevents variations like "LinkedIn" vs. "linkedin" from skewing your data.
Step 2: Building the Dashboard - From Manual to AI-Powered
With your data neatly organized, it’s time to build the dashboard. We'll start with the traditional approach using formulas and then show how AI can make the process dramatically simpler and faster.
The Old-School Way: Formulas and Pivot Tables
Understanding the manual method provides a solid foundation. In a new tab named "Dashboard," you can use formulas to pull summary data from your "Recruiting Data" sheet.
The COUNTIF and COUNTIFS functions are your best friends for tallying up candidates. For example, to count the number of active candidates currently in the "Phone Screen" stage, you would use:
=COUNTIF('Recruiting Data'!I:I, "Phone Screen")
Pivot tables are another powerful tool for summarizing data without writing complex formulas. You can use a pivot table to quickly see things like the number of applications per job source or the number of open roles per department. Simply highlight your data, go to Insert > Pivot Table, and then drag and drop the fields you want to analyze.
While effective, this method is time-consuming. You have to write each formula, configure every pivot table, and manually create charts from that output. It works, but it can be a slow, tedious grind.
The Smart Way: Using AI to Build Your Dashboard
This is where things get exciting. Instead of manually crunching numbers, you can tell the AI what you want, and it builds it for you. Google Sheets has a built-in AI feature called Explore that’s a fantastic starting point.
The "Explore" tool can interpret natural language questions to generate charts and insights automatically. Here’s how to use it:
On your "Recruiting Data" sheet, select the range of data you want to analyze.
Click the Explore icon in the bottom-right corner (it looks like a green-and-white icon with four sparkles).
A sidebar will appear. You can type questions directly into the text box, such as:
“bar chart of applications by Source”
“Donut chart showing number of hires by department”
“average time to fill by hiring manager“
Explore will instantly generate the chart or analysis you asked for. You can then click and drag the chart directly onto your "Dashboard" tab. It’s an incredibly fast way to create your core visuals without touching a single formula.
Step 3: Visualizing Your Key Recruiting Metrics
A good dashboard tells a story at a glance. The key is to choose the right visualizations for the metrics that matter most to your team.
Designing Your Dashboard Layout
Open your "Dashboard" tab. Think of it as a canvas. A common layout is to place your high-level, single-number KPIs at the top in "scorecard" style boxes. These are your headline numbers, like Total Open Roles, Average Time to Fill, and Overall Offer Acceptance Rate. Below these, you can arrange your more detailed charts and graphs.
Essential Charts and Visualizations
Here are five cornerstone visuals for any recruitment dashboard:
Recruitment Funnel Chart: Use a horizontal bar chart to show how many candidates are in each stage of your hiring process. This makes it incredibly easy to see where candidates are dropping off and investigate why.
Source of Hire Effectiveness: A pie chart or bar chart is perfect for showing where your successful hires come from. Answering "Which channels produce actual hires, not just applicants?" helps you allocate your time and budget more effectively.
Time to Fill Trendline: A line chart that plots the "Time to Fill" metric over months or quarters. This will show you if your process improvements are actually making you a faster, more efficient hiring team over time.
Open Positions by Department: A simple column chart that displays the number of open jobs for each team. This helps visualize recruiting workload and resource allocation needs across the company.
Rejection Reasons: A bar or pie chart illustrating why candidates leave the process. Are you losing them to competitors? Are your salary offers too low? This invaluable feedback loop can help you refine your offers and process.
Tips for Maintaining a Powerful Recruiting Dashboard
Creating the dashboard is just the beginning. To keep it useful, it needs to be treated as a living tool that evolves with your team's needs.
Keep Your Data Clean and Updated: "Garbage in, garbage out" is a universal data truth. Dedicate time each week to ensure your "Recruiting Data" sheet is up-to-date. For more advanced setups, you can use tools like Zapier or Make.com to automatically pipe data from your ATS into your Google Sheet, which drastically reduces manual entry.
Ask "Why?": The dashboard's job is to surface questions, not just provide answers. If you notice "Time to Hire" is creeping up, don't just note the number - dig in. Is one department struggling? Is a particular stage holding things up? Your dashboard is a launchpad for strategic conversations.
Share and Iterate: Share a "view-only" link with hiring managers and leadership. The transparency will build trust and foster collaboration. Schedule a quick quarterly review to ask your team: Are we tracking the right things? What new challenges do we need to measure? Don’t be afraid to adjust your metrics and visuals as your hiring goals change.
Final Thoughts
Building a recruitment dashboard in Google Sheets transforms mountains of messy data into a clear, actionable roadmap for your team. It centralizes your entire hiring funnel, helps you optimize your process with data-driven insights, and keeps everyone on the same page. While you can build it manually, using AI to ask simple questions and generate visualizations makes analytics accessible to everyone, not just data experts.
Often, the biggest challenge is that your data isn't in one Google Sheet to begin with - it's scattered across your ATS, LinkedIn campaigns, HR software, and more. Pulling it all together is a constant, manual chore. This is where we built Graphed to do the heavy lifting for you. We allow you to connect all your data sources in minutes and create live, interactive dashboards just by asking questions in plain English. This hands you back the time you’d otherwise spend exporting CSVs and fighting with formulas, so you can focus on what really matters: finding and hiring great people.