HR Metrics Dashboard
Interactive HR dashboard as pulse check and basis for data-driven decision making
Why
From recruitment, development to performance management, business is increasingly depending on technology and data to monitor the lifeblood of the company. To help translate data into stories and spot the latest trends in the firm, HR dashboard helps visualize the streams of data into charts, graphs and metrics. By presenting structured data graphically, it helps us to make real time data-driven decisions, including
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Where should we spend time and money sourcing new candidates from?
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How is the employee engagement and what are the possible factors driving engagement?
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How is our attrition trending? Are we keeping our best people?
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Are people benefiting from our training offerings?
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What is the difference in skill level between the top and bottom performers in the firm?
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And more...
What
For a dashboard, I believe it should be question-driven instead of data-driven. By asking good questions that are relevant to the business, we can nail down what needs to be measured and work our way to use the data and provide insights. After all, there can be dozens of KPI that can be monitored. A dashboard is a means to an end, by just pulling all the data we have, it won't revolutionize a company. It is about understanding the business and asking the right questions. We then narrow down what to be measured and provide a clear and intuitive picture that drives informed decisions and strategies.
How
There are many platforms out there to build a HR dashboard, it can be built in existing HR software platforms like Workday, PeopleSoft, or business intelligence tools like PowerBI, Tableau. In the below example, I will be using Tableau to build a sample dashboard based on the HR dataset from Dr. Carla Patalano here. The dataset contains a total of 36 columns of data (i.e. Gender, Department, Performance) with 311 rows of unique values, each representing an employee's data.
An overview dashboard is a place where gives you a snapshot of the current workforce. You can explore patterns and relationships among data by interacting with different metrics and charts in the dashboard. You can also lay down important KPI and metrics of your interest or dimensions that are relevant to the business needs.
The below is a sample overview dashboard where you can
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Have an overview of the workforce demographics
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Explore the relationship of demographics variables with engagement level, satisfaction level and performance level
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Explore the patterns of salary across race and gender
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And more...
You are recommended to use a laptop to view the below dashboards for a better user experience.
While an overview dashboard can give you a snapshot of the workforce, we can always drill down to a specific area for more detailed reporting. Let say for recruitment, we would like to discover and interpret meaningful patterns for sourcing, selecting, and hiring. For example,
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Which sourcing channels provide the best candidate?
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Are we recruiting a diverse workforce from the different sourcing channels?
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What do our best candidates have in common?
From the questions, we can pull the relevant metrics and develop more specific dashboards that are geared toward it. In the below, it is a sample recruitment dashboard based on the given dataset.
The key of building a dashboard is that we always start with a question in mind. We then formulate a hypothesis, select and plot the needed metrics and data to answer the questions that are relevant to the business context and needs. By doing so, we can move from a purely operational analysis that is more descriptive based to advanced reporting that emphasis more on exploring the patterns and relationships of multiple variables. Meanwhile, for more in-depth predictive analysis and development of models, I would recommend using R, Python, SPSS as they provide a more established environment for these statistical analyses.