How to Make a Recruitment Dashboard in Excel

Tracking your hiring progress can feel like trying to solve a puzzle with pieces scattered across different spreadsheets, your applicant tracking system (ATS), and email threads. A well-organized recruitment dashboard in Excel pulls all those pieces together into one clear picture. This guide will walk you through, step-by-step, how to build your own interactive dashboard to monitor your hiring pipeline, from initial application to signed offer.

First Things First: Why Use a Recruitment Dashboard?

A recruitment dashboard gives you a visual at-a-glance summary of your most important hiring metrics. Instead of digging through rows of data to see how things are going, you get a clean, high-level view that helps you spot bottlenecks, understand which hiring sources are most effective, and report progress to your team and leadership efficiently.

Using Excel for this has some clear benefits:

• Accessibility: Most businesses already have Excel. You don't need to purchase or learn a new, complex business intelligence tool just to get started.
• Customization: You have complete control over what metrics you track and how you visualize them. Your dashboard can be tailored to your specific hiring process.
• Flexibility: While many companies use dedicated applicant tracking systems, you can still export data as a CSV and use Excel's powerful tools to analyze it in more detail.

Step 1: Get Your Recruitment Data Organized

Your dashboard will only be as good as the data powering it. The first, and most crucial, step is to create a well-structured data source. This is where all your raw recruitment information will live.

Create a Recruitment Tracker

Open a new Excel sheet and name it something like "Recruitment_Data". Create a table with clear headers for each piece of information you want to track for every single applicant. Consistent data entry is vital here.

Here’s a great starting set of columns to include:

• Candidate ID: A unique number for each candidate.
• Candidate Name: The applicant's full name.
• Job Title: The position they applied for.
• Recruiter: The person responsible for the role.
• Source: Where the candidate came from (e.g., LinkedIn, Indeed, Employee Referral, Company Website).
• Application Date: The date the application was received.
• Pipeline Stage: The candidate's current stage in the process (e.g., Application Review, Phone Screen, First Interview, Technical Assessment, Final Interview, Offer Extended).
• Status: The candidate's overall status (e.g., Active, Hired, Rejected, Withdrew).
• Interview Date: The date of their first interview. Can be left blank until scheduled.
• Offer Date: Date an offer was made.
• Hire Date: The candidate's start date if hired.
• Rejection Date: The date a candidate was rejected.

Format Your Data as an Excel Table

Once you have your headers, click anywhere on your data and press Ctrl + T (or Cmd + T on Mac). This transforms your plain data range into an official Excel Table. Why is this so important?

• It's dynamic. When you add a new candidate (a new row), the table automatically expands, and any charts or PivotTables connected to it will recognize the new data when you refresh. No more manually adjusting data ranges!
• It makes formulas easier. You can use structured references like Table1[Source] instead of C2:C500, which is much easier to read and manage.

Your data source is now ready. The next step is to calculate the core metrics that will populate your dashboard.

Step 2: Calculate Your Key Hiring Metrics

To really understand your performance, you need to go from raw data to meaningful metrics. You can add these as new columns in your "Recruitment_Data" table or calculate them directly within PivotTables, which we'll cover in the next step. Let's start with a classic: Time to Hire.

Calculating "Time to Hire"

Time to Hire (or Time to Fill) measures the number of days between an application date and a hire date. This helps you understand the efficiency of your hiring process.

In your Excel Table, add a new column called "Time to Hire (Days)". In the first cell of that column, enter this simple formula:

=[@[Hire Date]]-[@[Application Date]]

Because you're using an Excel Table, the formula will automatically fill down for all rows. Now you have a precise measurement for every successful hire.

Use PivotTables to Summarize Key Data Points

PivotTables do the heavy lifting in Excel analytics. They allow you to rapidly summarize and aggregate your data without writing complex formulas. We'll use them to calculate most of our dashboard metrics.

Go to your "Recruitment_Data" sheet, click anywhere inside a new sheet in the workbook where your tables can be kept. From the Excel ribbon, go to Insert > PivotTable. Excel will automatically select your table range. Choose to place the PivotTable in a new worksheet and name it "Dashboard_Backend" or "PivotTables" and click OK.

Now, let's create a few essential PivotTables.

1. Candidates by Pipeline Stage

This table will count how many active candidates are in each stage of your hiring process.

• Drag the "Pipeline Stage" field into the Rows area.
• Drag the "Candidate ID" field into the Values area. Make sure it's set to "Count of Candidate ID."
• Drag the "Status" field into the Filters area. Click the filter dropdown and select "Active".

You now have a clean summary of your active pipeline.

2. Hires by Source

This is crucial for understanding where your best candidates come from.

• Create a new PivotTable next to the first one.
• Drag "Source" to the Rows area.
• Drag "Candidate ID" to the Values area (set to Count).
• Drag "Status" to the Filters area and select "Hired".

This shows you exactly how many hires came from each source.

3. Offer Acceptance Rate

This important KPI tells you how competitive your offers are.

• Create a third PivotTable.
• Drag "Status" to the Rows area.
• Drag "Candidate ID" to the Values area (set to Count).
• Filter this PivotTable for rows where the status is either "Hired" or "Offer Rejected". Now you can calculate the acceptance rate with a simple formula next to the table: (Number of "Hired") / (Total "Hired" + "Offer Rejected").

Step 3: Build Your Dashboard Visualizations

With your PivotTables ready, it’s time for the fun part: creating the charts and KPI cards that will make up your recruitment dashboard.

First, create a brand-new sheet and name it "Dashboard." This clean canvas is where you'll assemble all your visual elements.

Create Your First Chart: The Hiring Funnel

Let's visualize the "Candidates by Pipeline Stage" PivotTable we created.

1. Click anywhere inside your pipeline stage PivotTable.
2. Go to the PivotTable Analyze tab on the ribbon and click on PivotChart.
3. Choose a Bar Chart or a Funnel Chart (if your version of Excel supports it). A bar chart works perfectly. Click OK.

You'll now have a chart that visually represents your hiring funnel. It will have gray "field buttons" on it. Right-click any of these buttons and select "Hide All Field Buttons on Chart" to clean up the look.

Now, cut this chart (Ctrl + X) and paste it (Ctrl + V) onto your "Dashboard" sheet. Resize it and place it where you'd like it to go.

Build More Visuals

Repeat the process for your other PivotTables.

• Hires by Source: A Pie Chart or a Donut Chart is a great choice here. It quickly shows which source makes up the biggest slice of your successful hires.
• Hires Over Time: Create a new PivotTable that counts Hires by "Hire Date" (you can group the dates by month). Then, create a Line Chart to see hiring trends over time.

Create KPI Cards

Dashboards rely on big, bold numbers (KPIs) that give you instant insights. Let's create a few.

KPI Card: Total Hires

1. On your "Dashboard" sheet, go to Insert > Text Box. Draw a small rectangle.
2. Click on the border of the text box, then go to the Formula Bar.
3. Type = and then navigate to your "PivotTables" sheet. Click the cell containing the grand total from your "Hires by Source" PivotTable. Press Enter.
4. The text box is now dynamically linked to your data! Format the text to make it large and bold. Add another text box underneath with the label "Total Hires."

Repeat this process to create KPI cards for "Average Time to Hire" (link to a cell with the AVERAGE of your "Time to Hire" column) and "Offer Acceptance Rate" (link to the cell where you calculated this rate).

Step 4: Make Your Dashboard Interactive with Slicers

This final step is what turns a static report into a truly useful dashboard. Slicers are interactive filters that allow you (or anyone you share the dashboard with) to drill down into the data.

1. Click on any of your charts on the dashboard.
2. From the PivotChart Analyze ribbon, click Insert Slicer.
3. A dialog box will appear with all your data headers. Check the boxes for the fields you want to filter by - "Job Title" and "Recruiter" are excellent choices. Click OK.
4. You'll now see two slicer boxes appear on your dashboard. Right now, they only control the one chart you had selected. Let's fix that.
5. Right-click on the "Job Title" slicer and select "Report Connections."
6. In the menu that pops up, check the box for every single PivotTable in your workbook. Click OK.
7. Repeat this for the "Recruiter" slicer.

Now, when you click on a job title like "Marketing Manager," every single chart and KPI card on your dashboard will instantly update to show data for only that role. This allows you to effortlessly narrow your focus and answer specific questions in seconds.

Final Thoughts

Building a recruitment dashboard in Excel is a powerful way to take control of your hiring data. By organizing your data in a simple table and using the power of PivotTables and Slicers, you can create an insightful, interactive tool that helps you make smarter hiring decisions without needing specialized software.

As our hiring gets more complex, keeping that central Excel sheet updated manually can become a chore. We built Graphed to solve this very problem. Instead of exporting CSVs and refreshing PivotTables, we connect directly to your data sources — whether it's an ATS, HubSpot, or even a Google Sheet where you're tracking candidates. You can ask questions in plain English like, "Show me a dashboard of our hiring funnel by job title," and get a live, automated dashboard in seconds, freeing you up to focus on finding great candidates, not wrangling data.