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How to Create an HR Dashboard in Google Sheets with AI

Cody Schneider•

Building a useful HR dashboard often feels like a frustrating task, requiring you to wrestle with complex formulas or learn a dedicated BI tool. But with the AI features already built into Google Sheets, you can create a powerful, insightful dashboard by simply asking questions in plain English. This post will walk you through how to gather your HR data, structure it correctly, and use AI to build a dynamic HR dashboard without writing a single VLOOKUP.

Why Use Google Sheets for an HR Dashboard?

Before diving into the AI-powered methods, it's worth noting why Google Sheets is such a great starting point for HR reporting, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. It’s more than just a free alternative to Excel, it's a collaborative hub for your people data.

  • It’s Free and Accessible: Every person with a Google account has access to Sheets. There's no software to install and no licensing fees to worry about. Your team can access the HR dashboard from anywhere with an internet connection.

  • Seamless Collaboration: HR rarely works in a silo. You might need input from finance on salary data or from hiring managers on recruitment metrics. In Google Sheets, you can @-mention colleagues directly in comments, assign action items, and see everyone’s changes in real time. This eliminates the headache of emailing different spreadsheet versions back and forth.

  • Powerful Integrations: Google Sheets lives within a massive ecosystem. You can connect it to Google Forms to automatically populate survey responses for employee satisfaction reports. You can also use services like Zapier to pull data from your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or HRIS directly into your sheet, automating a huge chunk of manual data entry.

Gathering and Structuring Your HR Data

Your dashboard is only as good as the data it's built on. The first and most critical step is organizing your HR information into a clean, simple, and machine-readable format. AI can do a lot, but it works best with structured data.

The best practice is to treat your Google Sheet like a mini-database. Use separate tabs for different types of raw data, and never merge cells or add stylistic formatting to your raw data tabs. Your primary tab should be a dedicated "Dashboard" that pulls from these raw data tabs.

Key HR Metrics to Track

Here are some of the most common and valuable metrics to include in your dashboard, along with how to structure the underlying data.

Recruitment Metrics

  • Time to Hire: The average number of days between opening a job requisition and a candidate accepting the offer.

  • Cost per Hire: The total cost of recruiting (ad spend, recruiter fees, etc.) divided by the number of hires.

  • Offer Acceptance Rate: The percentage of candidates who accept a formal job offer.

  • Source of Hire: Which channels (LinkedIn, referrals, career page) your best candidates are coming from.

Example Data Structure (in a "Recruitment Data" tab): Position, Department, Date Opened, Date Closed, Status, Hired Candidate, Source, Recruitment Cost

Employee Engagement & Retention

  • Headcount: The total number of employees, often broken down by department, location, or employment type (full-time, part-time).

  • Turnover Rate: The percentage of employees who leave the company over a specific period. You can segment this into voluntary (employee resignation) vs. involuntary (termination) turnover.

  • Employee Satisfaction (eNPS): Measured through surveys, this helps you gauge overall morale and identify potential issues.

  • Average Tenure: The average length of time employees stay with the company.

Example Data Structure (in an "Employee Data" tab): Employee ID, Name, Department, Role, Start Date, End Date, Status (Active/Terminated), Termination Type (Voluntary/Involuntary)

Performance and Development

  • Performance Ratings: Average performance scores from review cycles, broken down by manager or department.

  • Promotion Rate: The percentage of employees who are promoted within a certain time frame.

  • Training Cost Per Employee: The total investment in training and development.

Your golden rule should be: one row per record, and one column per data attribute. Keeping your data tidy like this will make the AI analysis almost effortless.

How AI Simplifies Dashboard Creation in Google Sheets

Traditionally, building a dashboard in a spreadsheet meant getting your hands dirty with formulas. You'd spend hours piecing together SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, and QUERY functions, or wrestling with the settings in the Pivot Table editor. For many, this process is intimidating and time-consuming. One misplaced comma in a formula could break your entire chart.

AI changes this dynamic completely. Instead of telling the software how to calculate something, you just tell it what you want to see. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry, empowering anyone on the HR team to become a data analyst without needing to take a course on advanced spreadsheet functions.

Meet Your New Co-Pilot: The "Explore" Feature

The main AI tool you'll use is Google Sheets’ built-in Explore feature. It's a small icon in the bottom-right corner of your sheet that opens a powerful analytics pane. It automatically analyzes your selected data and provides three key functions:

  1. Answers: You can type questions in a text box using plain language (e.g., "how many employees in the engineering department?") and get an instant answer or formula.

  2. Analysis: It automatically generates charts and pre-built analyses it thinks you'll find interesting based on your data. For example, if you have salary and department data, it will likely create a bar chart showing the average salary by department on its own.

  3. Formatting: It can also automatically apply high-contrast colors and professional styles to your tables with a single click.

Step-by-Step: Building Your First AI-Powered HR Chart

Let's walk through a practical example of building a key visualization for your HR dashboard: a breakdown of employee headcount by department.

Step 1: Get Your Data Ready

Make sure your "Employee Data" tab is set up cleanly. For this example, you only need three columns: Employee ID, Department, and Status.

Your data should look something like this:

  • EMPID001, Sales, Active

  • EMPID002, Engineering, Active

  • EMPID003, Marketing, Resigned

  • EMPID004, Engineering, Active

  • ...and so on.

Step 2: Select Your Data Range

Click and drag your mouse to highlight the columns you want to analyze. In this case, highlight the "Department" and "Status" columns.

Step 3: Open the Explore Pane

With your data selected, click the Explore icon in the bottom-right corner of the window. It looks like a small square with a star inside. The Explore pane will slide out on the right.

Step 4: Ask Your Question

You may see that Explore has already suggested the chart you want. But to see the real power, let's use the question box at the top of the pane. Type in:

"bar chart of headcount by department where status is Active"

As you type, Google Sheets' AI parses your sentence. It understands that "headcount" means you want a count of rows. It knows to group the data by the "Department" column. And it recognizes the "where" clause as a filter, excluding any rows that don't say "Active" in the status column.

Step 5: Add the Chart to Your Dashboard

The Explore feature will instantly generate a professional-looking bar chart. Hover over the chart and you'll see two small icons appear at the top.

  • Insert Chart: This button adds the chart directly into your current sheet.

  • View Fullscreen: This gives you a closer look and more editing options.

Click "Insert Chart." Google will place it on your sheet. You can then cut and paste this chart into your dedicated "Dashboard" tab.

That's it! You just created a perfectly calculated, filtered report in seconds, without a single formula. Repeat this process for all your key metrics: "pie chart of gender distribution," "line chart of new hires by month for the last year," "average tenure by department," and more.

Tips for Designing an Effective HR Dashboard

Once you've built your charts, arranging them effectively is key to making your dashboard useful.

  • Create a Dedicated "Dashboard" Tab: All of your charts and key performance indicators (KPIs) should live on a single, clean tab. Your raw data should stay hidden on other tabs.

  • Put the Most Important Info First: Most people read from top-left to bottom-right. Place your most critical, high-level KPIs like Total Headcount, Turnover Rate, and eNPS score right at the top so they're visible at a glance.

  • Group Related Metrics: Organize your dashboard into logical sections. Keep all your recruitment charts in one area, engagement and retention in another, and diversity and inclusion in a third. This creates a clear narrative.

  • Use Chart Titles and Labels: It should be obvious what each chart represents without having to guess. Use clear, descriptive titles like "Headcount by Department (as of Q2)" or "Monthly Employee Turnover Rate."

Final Thoughts

Google Sheets gives you an incredibly accessible way to turn raw HR data into valuable insights, and its built-in AI tools remove the daunting technical hurdles. By organizing your data correctly and asking plain-English questions, you can build a comprehensive and shareable HR dashboard that helps you make smarter decisions about your people.

For teams looking to automate even further, this is just the beginning. At Graphed, we've built a platform that takes this approach to the next level. Instead of having to collect and put your information into a Google Sheet first, we allow you to connect directly to all your different data sources. From there, you can use natural language not just for a single chart, but to build an entire live dashboard in seconds that updates in real-time. If you love the idea of AI-powered analysis but want to get out of spreadsheets entirely, you can get started with Graphed today.