A weekly dashboard has one job: tell you what needs attention this week. Anything that does not change a decision belongs in the monthly report, or nowhere.
Five numbers
| Number | Answers | What you do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Open jobs with nobody in the process | Which searches have stalled? | Go looking, or reset expectations |
| Candidates waiting on someone, by person | Who is holding things up? | A specific nudge to a specific person |
| Days since last contact | Who is going cold? | Contact them today |
| Offers out and their status | What is about to close or fall through? | Step in before a refusal |
| Hires so far against the plan | Are we on track? | The conversation with the business |
The third one is the most valuable on the list. Every recruiting team loses people to silence, and almost none can name who is currently being lost that way.
Rules for a dashboard people actually use
- Every number shows its count. "62%" is not a fact. "13 of 21" is.
- Every chart says what dates it covers. Without it, people compare different time periods.
- No jargon. Hiring managers read this.
- Nothing needs you to explain it. If a number only makes sense when you are in the room, it will be misread in every meeting you miss.
- It fits on one screen. A dashboard that scrolls is a report.
- Flag small samples. Anything under about ten should show a count, not a percentage.
Building it from exports
Most built-in reporting is either too rigid or too slow to set up. A weekly export into a spreadsheet, with the sums already built, is usually the fastest route to something useful and the easiest to change.
- One export: candidates, with job, stage, date they entered that stage, source, owner, status.
- One export: jobs, with the date opened, target start date, status.
- Sums on a separate sheet, so a fresh export never overwrites your formulas.
- The dashboard reads from the sums sheet, never from the raw data.
That third rule saves more trouble than anything else here. The most common way spreadsheet dashboards die is someone pasting new data over the formulas.
Keeping it current
Schedule the export if your system can. If not, pick a fixed time — Monday morning — and always do it then. A dashboard refreshed irregularly is worse than none, because nobody can tell whether they are looking at last week or last month.
Show the refresh date clearly. That is the difference between a number being trusted and being questioned.
Download the dashboard spreadsheet · all templates
The test
Does the dashboard change what you do on Monday? If it only tells you how last quarter went, it is a report — useful, but it belongs somewhere else and on a different schedule.