Blog · Board and management reporting
A recruitment dashboard connects hiring stages with the people a business needs to start work. Use this worked example to define the funnel, reconcile starts, and distinguish accepted offers from staffing capacity.
A Power BI recruitment dashboard should show whether hiring will meet staffing requirements, alongside the funnel that produces those hires. Start with approved positions and confirmed starts, then explain the gap with applications, interviews, offers, and acceptances from a consistently defined cohort.
Microsoft describes a Power BI dashboard as a single page of highlights with related reports providing detail. Use that distinction here: the overview answers the staffing question; the underlying report explains where candidates stop progressing. Covirage is not affiliated with Microsoft.
Use aggregate recruiting exports, without applicant names, contact details, resumes, or interview notes. Keep a department, hiring cohort, approved requirement, application count, stage counts, and reporting cutoff. A separate aggregate roster export supplies confirmed starts by department and start date.
Decide whether a counted unit is a person, application, or requisition. One person applying to different jobs can create multiple applications. The worked example uses unique applications within each department, with no candidate hired more than once. Every offer and start belongs to the same tracked application cohort.
The hypothetical company is a US business services provider. It needs new employees in place by September 30, 2026. Applications entered the tracked cohort earlier, and the dashboard follows their progress through that cutoff. Later applications belong to another cohort rather than being added to improve the funnel's appearance.
Microsoft's Human Resources example separates new hires, active employees, and employees who have left. For this recruiting review, keep the emphasis on new starts against requirements. Use the separate headcount dashboard example for the workforce stock and its FTE reconciliation.
The requirement is approved incremental hiring, not total department headcount. All stage columns are cumulative counts: an application that reached an offer remains included in the earlier stages.
| Department | Required starts | Applications | Screened | Interviewed | Offers | Accepted | Started |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Service | 12 | 120 | 60 | 24 | 18 | 15 | 13 |
| Sales | 8 | 80 | 32 | 16 | 12 | 10 | 8 |
| Finance | 4 | 40 | 20 | 8 | 6 | 5 | 4 |
| Total | 24 | 240 | 112 | 48 | 36 | 30 | 25 |
Define the summary measures before choosing charts:
Offer acceptance = Accepted offers / Offers
Application-to-start conversion = Confirmed starts / Applications
Requirement coverage = Confirmed starts / Required starts
The company has 30 / 36 = 83.3% offer acceptance and 25 / 240 = 10.4% application-to-start conversion. It has 25 / 24 = 104.2% requirement coverage. Percentages are rounded to one decimal place after division; counts stay whole.
Coverage above the requirement is useful context, not permission to overstaff. Service started 13 against 12 required, while Sales and Finance each met their own requirement. Confirm whether the additional Service start was approved and whether it fills a separate vacancy before treating it as spare capacity.
The department starts sum to 13 + 8 + 4 = 25. The approved requirements sum to 12 + 8 + 4 = 24. The company therefore has one more confirmed start than the stated requirement. The roster's count of qualifying new employees must independently equal 25.
Accepted offers also reconcile: 30 accepted = 25 started + 5 awaiting a start. At department level, the awaiting-start counts are 2 for Service, 2 for Sales, and 1 for Finance. That identity only holds here because none of the accepted offers was withdrawn or canceled before the cutoff; add an explicit status for those outcomes in a real export.
For a spreadsheet check, use the table's columns B through H for required starts through actual starts. With department rows 2 through 4, enter:
=SUM(H2:H4)/SUM(B2:B4)
=SUM(G2:G4)-SUM(H2:H4)
The results are 104.2% coverage and 5 accepted offers awaiting a start. Use the ratio of totals for company conversion rates. Do not average departmental rates or combine an offer count from one cohort with an acceptance count from another. An Excel dashboard can present the same checked measures before a broader reporting rollout.
Now change only Service's confirmed starts at the cutoff, from 13 to 11. The accepted offers, requirement, applications, and every other input remain unchanged. These employees have later start dates, so their accepted offers remain in the cohort.
| Measure | Base | Later-start variation |
|---|---|---|
| Service starts | 13 | 11 |
| Company starts | 25 | 23 |
| Accepted offers awaiting a start | 5 | 7 |
| Company requirement coverage | 104.2% | 95.8% |
| Service requirement coverage | 108.3% | 91.7% |
The new checks are 11 + 8 + 4 = 23 starts and 30 = 23 + 7 accepted offers. Company coverage becomes 23 / 24 = 95.8%; Service coverage is 11 / 12 = 91.7%. Offer acceptance stays 83.3% because neither offers nor acceptances changed.
That is a scheduling problem before it is a funnel problem. Recruiting should verify start dates with hiring managers; operations should review the temporary staffing gap. Keep the effect on workload in the operations dashboard, where staffing needs connect with throughput rather than candidate activity.
The recruiting owner should certify the stage counts; department managers should certify the staffing requirement. Compare this focused layout with the broader business dashboard examples when deciding which measures belong in an executive review.
Bring an aggregate recruiting export, the approved staffing requirement, and a roster summary of confirmed starts. Covirage maps the columns; its tools compute and check conversion rates, staffing gaps, and count reconciliations, while the external AI model explains the results with every figure traced to its rows. Create a free Covirage account, which takes about a minute, then set up your business and bring a sample of your own data.
See capacity planning for the staffing requirement behind the hiring review.
Start with required hires, confirmed starts, accepted offers awaiting a start, and conversion between hiring stages. Add the reporting cutoff and cohort definition. These measures distinguish a busy recruiting process from one that actually fills the business's staffing requirement.
Keep accepted offers separate from confirmed starts. An accepted offer may have a future start date or may never become a start. Show both counts and reconcile the difference so managers can see which positions still lack someone working.
That calculation describes activity in a month, but it is not a candidate conversion rate when the starts came from earlier applications. For conversion, follow a defined application cohort through the stages and state how long it has had to mature.
Covirage analyzes the exports behind the business question. You bring your own file or Google Sheet, its tools compute and check the figures, and the external AI model explains the results with every figure traced to its rows.