The ultimate guide to hiring dashboards: the interview health dashboard

In this sixth installment of our Ultimate Recruiting Operations Dashboard series, we discuss the “interview health” dashboard. We’ll show you how to tailor your hiring dashboard to look specifically at the health of your recruiting process. We’ll talk through the recruiting metrics you should be tracking and why, and we’ll give you some templates you can use to build the perfect hiring dashboard for your needs.

If you’d like to read the other articles in our Ultimate Guide to Hiring Dashboards series check out the links below: 

• Essential hiring dashboard

• Executive summary dashboard

• Recruiting health dashboard

• Pipeline composition dashboard

• Recruiting team productivity dashboard

Disclaimer: The metrics and dashboards shown below are all based on Gem’s platform. If you’re not a Gem user (yet!), we still recommend you take a look at these metrics and track them as best you can.

The interview health dashboard

Your interview health dashboard provides a full-funnel look at the overall state of your hiring process. This dashboard takes an in-depth look at where and how your sourcers, recruiters, and interviewers are spending their time as well as the real business impact of their efforts. These data points allow you to identify potential areas in need of improvement, optimize your interview process, and manage interviewer workload.

Key metrics to track when looking at interview health are: 

• Current open jobs

• Current job openings

• Scorecard decisions

• Job time open

• Interview time by job

• Interviews by week

• Accepted interviews by week

• Interviews by stage

• Interviewer time (by interviewer)

• Accepted interviewer time (by interviewer)

• Time to complete scorecard by interviewer

• Interviews (by interviewer)

• Accepted interviews (by interviewer)

Here’s what your interview health dashboard might look like in Gem:

Current open jobs ‍

Current open jobs look at the specific types of roles currently open at your organization. This gives you a high-level overview of the breadth of reqs your team is responsible for across the organization. For example, your organization may be hiring Mid-market AEs, Senior software engineers, and Events marketers. In this case, you would have three open jobs.  

Current job openings

The current job openings metric provides the next layer of granularity from “current open jobs”. This metric looks at how many of a certain type of role are available. For example, let's say you’re hiring five entry-level Sales Reps. In this case, you’d have one open job, but five job openings. This metric provides the information you need to accurately capacity plan for your organization’s growth goals. 

Scorecard decisions

Including scorecard decisions in your interview health dashboard gives you an indication of the quality of candidates entering your hiring funnel as well as how those candidates are progressing through the process. For example, a large “yes” or “strong yes” proportion means that interviewers would like to see those candidates move forward in the hiring process, which good-quality candidates and a strong alignment between hiring managers and recruiters. On the other hand, if the percentage of “no” or “definitely not” responses is high, this may indicate the need to rework the job description or re-sync with the hiring manager on role requirements. 

Job time open by job‍

‍Looking at how long each job req has been open is critical in capacity planning for specific teams as it shows the lead time it will likely take to bring on new headcount. Granted, some roles by nature will have a longer hiring process than others (e.g. ones that require multiple interviews, assessments, etc.), but jobs with particularly long open times are a great place to start when you’re looking to optimize your hiring process. 

Interview time by job ‍

Interview time by job looks at the total number of interview hours dedicated to a specific role over a given period. This metric lets you see where your hiring teams are spending their time, and identify potential bottlenecks. For example, using the example above, that your team spent 215 hours interviewing candidates for Customer Success Manager roles, you can look at your process to figure out why so many hours are being spent here. ‍

The number here might seem rather large, but it’s important to keep in mind that these are cumulative across all the candidates that have applied for that job, so these numbers will be impacted by things like seniority, role type, job function, number of open positions, etc. In some cases (e.g. a position that requires very specific skills) this may be only a few candidates, and thus the interview time will likely be relatively short. However, other roles may see tens, or even hundreds of candidates, more interviews, and a longer total interview time. 

Interviews by week

At the end of the day, your TA team wants/needs to be interviewing candidates, and looking at the number of scheduled interviews by week allows you to see the impact of their hard work. Of course, many factors play a role in the number of interviews per week (e.g. hiring goals, recruiter headcount, seasonality, etc.), but this gives you solid insight into how your team is performing.

Accepted interviews by week

Adding accepted interviews by week to your dashboard tells you how many interviews candidates actually showed up for. When you compare the number of interviews per week to the number of accepted interviews per week, the two graphs should be relatively similar (although you should expect to see a little bit of variation for no-shows due to illness, emergencies, etc). However, if you see that the number of accepted interviews is drastically lower than the number of scheduled interviews per week, or see the number decline over time, this could be an indication of potential issues in your hiring process. Perhaps your talent brand is lacking and your team could be doing more to highlight the benefits of working at your organization. Maybe candidates have been reading negative reviews of your company online, or your compensation band is not in line with the market. Looking at the accepted interviews by week will help you identify potential problem areas and allow you to resolve them so all the hard work it takes to book a candidate for an interview doesn’t go to waste. 

Interviews by stage

‍A big part of your team’s job is moving candidates through your hiring process, and looking at the number of interviews by stage your team has gives you the visibility you need to see how your team is doing, identify any sticking points, and track your progress toward your hiring goals.

Interview time by recruiter

‍Interviewer time by interviewer gives you a snapshot of where your recruiters are spending their time, which is crucial information when discussing headcount planning and recruiter capacity. This metric also provides insight on which roles may be faster to fill, and which ones may take more time. For example, you may find that recruiters hiring for GTM roles tend to spend much more time interviewing candidates than recruiters hiring for technical roles. Could this be due to the sheer number of open positions within a certain function? Or the number of applicants for each role? These numbers can also be used to measure productivity within your recruiting team. In general, recruiters hiring for similar roles or departments should have a relatively similar number of interview hours, if not, you may want to dig a little deeper to figure out why. Does one recruiter have a more optimized process than the other and thus can hire the same candidates in fewer interview hours? Or are they interviewing fewer candidates overall?

Accepted interview time by recruiter

Not surprisingly, accepted interview time by recruiter tells you how many interviews candidates actually showed up for. Here again, the number of interview hours and accepted interview hours should be relatively similar, but you should also look at the difference between the accepted hours of individual recruiters. Are some recruiters being ghosted more often than others? If so, what are they doing differently from the others?

Time to complete scorecards by interviewer

Scorecards are a critical component of a fair hiring process. They reduce bias and help ensure that interviewers are evaluating candidates on the same set of questions. Looking at the total time to complete scorecards by interviewer in conjunction with the number of interviews a recruiter conducted during that same time period you will give you insight into who might be blocking a role from advancing and whose scorecards might be less accurate because of the time they take to complete them.

Interviews by recruiter

Interviews by recruiter is one of the most important metrics you can include in your dashboard. At the end of the day, your team needs to be interviewing candidates. This metric shows the fruits of your labor. This is also another crucial metric for headcount planning and capacity. There are only so many hours your recruiters can work before they get burnt out. If your organization decides to double its hiring targets overnight, this data allows you to temper expectations and/or build the case for bringing on additional resources to meet the new headcount goals.    

Interviews by coordinator

Talent acquisition is a team sport, and recruiters don’t operate alone. Many TA teams are supported by skilled coordinators who manage the recruiting process (which may change depending on which parts of the hiring process your coordinators support). Interviews by coordinator shows you the productivity of your coordination team—who has bandwidth and who doesn’t. 

As a RecOps professional, you know the value of good data—it informs nearly every facet of your job and empowers you to make better decisions for your TA team. Creating easy-to-read hiring dashboards is the key to better understanding your recruiting data and getting buy-in from key stakeholders that are critical to your role. Your interview health dashboard allows you to monitor your recruiting team’s performance, optimize your interview process, and show the real business impact of your team’s efforts.

If you’d like to learn more about how to build your own recruiting team productivity dashboard, get in touch with us today!