How to Create an HR Dashboard in Google Analytics with AI
You might not think of Google Analytics as an HR tool, but it can be incredibly powerful for measuring the performance of your careers page, job postings, and even employee engagement on your company intranet. By tracking key metrics, you can understand which channels are driving the best job candidates and what content resonates most with your team. This tutorial will walk you through how to set up the right tracking and use AI to build an HR dashboard with your Google Analytics data.
Why Use Google Analytics for HR?
Your company’s website is often the first point of contact for potential hires, and your intranet is a central hub for current employees. Google Analytics provides the data to understand user behavior on these digital properties. It’s not a replacement for a traditional Human Resource Information System (HRIS), but it provides a unique lens into your digital HR efforts.
You can use it to answer critical questions like:
Which marketing channels (LinkedIn, job boards, social media) are driving the most traffic to our careers page?
Which of those channels bring in candidates who actually complete their applications?
Which job postings are getting the most views?
How are employees engaging with company news and resources on our intranet?
Tracking this information allows you to optimize your spending on recruitment marketing, improve your job descriptions, and create more engaging internal communications - all based on real data.
Setting Up the Right Tracking in GA4
Before you can build a dashboard, you need to make sure Google Analytics is capturing the right information. Most new analytics properties are Google Analytics 4, which uses an event-based model that's perfect for this kind of specific tracking. Here’s what you need to set up.
1. Identify Your Key User Actions (Events)
Think about the most important actions a potential candidate or an employee can take on your site. For each action, you’ll want to track it as an event in GA4. Some common HR-related events include:
view_job_posting: When someone views a specific job description page.
start_application: When a user clicks the "Apply Now" button but hasn't submitted yet.
submit_application: When a user successfully submits their application form.
For an internal company portal or intranet, events could include:
download_hr_document: When an employee downloads a form like a benefits summary or policy guide.
watch_training_video: A user plays an embedded training video.
view_company_news: A person clicks to read an internal announcement.
Many of these can be set up directly within the GA4 interface using the “Create event” feature without needing to change any code on your website.
2. Mark Key Events as Conversions
A "conversion" is just an event that you’ve marked as being particularly important to your goals. The most obvious conversion for an HR dashboard is a submitted application. By toggling on the “Mark as conversion” switch next to your submit_application event in GA4, you can more easily analyze the performance of your entire recruitment funnel.
This tells Google Analytics what success looks like, making it much easier to measure the conversion rate of different traffic sources and campaigns.
3. Use Parameters to Add Context
Events tell you what happened, but event parameters tell you the important details. For example, with an event like view_job_posting, you could add parameters for:
job_title: "Software Engineer"
department: "Engineering"
location: "Remote"
Adding these custom parameters requires a bit more setup, often with Google Tag Manager, but it massively enhances your reporting. It allows you to segment your data and see which specific departments, job titles, or locations are attracting the most attention. You could analyze whether "Marketing" jobs get more views than "Sales" jobs or how many views a specific high-priority role is receiving.
Key HR Metrics to Track on Your Dashboard
Once your tracking is in place, you can start monitoring the metrics that matter. A good HR dashboard should give you a clear, at-a-glance view of your recruitment funnel and employee engagement.
For Recruitment Marketing:
Career Page Sessions by Source/Medium: See exactly where your applicants are coming from (e.g., organic search, paid ads on LinkedIn, referrals from job boards).
Job Application Conversion Rate: The percentage of users who visited the careers section and ended up submitting an application. This is your most important recruitment metric.
Conversion Rate by Source/Medium: Identify which channels don't just send traffic, but send candidates who actually convert. Maybe a niche job board sends fewer visitors but has a much higher conversion rate than LinkedIn.
Top Viewed Job Postings: See which open roles are getting the most attention.
Total Application Submissions: A simple count of your main goal completions over time.
For Intranet & Employee Engagement:
Top Viewed Internal Pages: Understand which resources, announcements, or policy pages are most used by your team.
User Engagement Rate: See which pieces of content are actually being read versus which ones employees click on and immediately leave.
HR Document Downloads: Track how often key documents (like benefits guides or employee handbooks) are being accessed.
Two Ways to Build Your HR Dashboard
Okay, your data is flowing into Google Analytics. Now it's time to visualize it. You have two main paths: the traditional, manual way and the new, AI-powered way.
The Manual Method: Using Looker Studio
The standard way to build a dashboard with your GA4 data is to use a free tool like Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio). You connect your GA4 property as a data source, then you manually drag and drop charts onto a canvas.
For each chart - say, a pie chart of traffic sources - you have to:
Select the chart type.
Choose your Dimension (e.g., Session source/medium).
Choose your Metric (e.g., Sessions).
Apply filters to show only traffic to your
/careerspages.Style the chart with colors and labels.
Now, repeat that process for every single metric on your dashboard. This works, but it has a steep learning curve. Finding the right dimensions and metrics, setting up filters correctly, and designing the layout can take hours, especially if you're not a data analyst.
The AI-Powered Method: Using Natural Language
The fastest way to get to insights is by telling a tool what you want to see using plain English. This is where AI-powered analytics platforms come in. Instead of clicking through menus, you just write a prompt like you're talking to a teammate.
You can simply connect your Google Analytics account and ask:
“Create a dashboard with our key HR metrics for the last 90 days. I want to see a donut chart of career page sessions by source, a scorecard showing the application conversion rate, a bar chart of the top 10 viewed job pages, and a line chart of submitted applications over time.”
The system handles the entire process for you - finding the right metrics, applying filters, selecting the best chart types, and arranging them into a clean dashboard. What would have taken an entire afternoon manually now takes less than a minute. You can then ask follow-up questions to dig deeper, such as “Which traffic source had the best conversion rate last month?” or “Compare the number of views for software developer roles vs. marketing roles.” This approach removes the technical barrier and lets you focus on the insights, not the setup.
Final Thoughts
Connecting your HR goals to your web analytics can give you an incredible advantage in a competitive hiring market and help you build a more connected workplace. By setting up event tracking in Google Analytics for key actions like application submissions and content views, you create a rich dataset to optimize your recruitment marketing and internal communications strategy.
At Graphed, we built a tool to make this process incredibly simple. Instead of spending hours wrangling data in spreadsheets or learning a complex BI tool, you can connect your Google Analytics account in seconds and create dashboards using simple, natural language. We turn the tedious work of report building into a quick conversation, so you get the data you need to make smarter hiring and engagement decisions and get back to your day.