An HR dashboard functions as an advanced analytics tool that utilizes interactive data visualizations to present crucial HR metrics. Its primary objective is to enhance the HR department’s recruitment processes, optimize workplace management, and improve overall employee performance.

Similar to various other business departments, human resources is gradually transforming into a data-centric function. With a plethora of HR key performance indicators (KPIs), the aim is to transition from mere reporting to leveraging analytics effectively. This enables companies and managers to monitor and predict employee performance, make informed talent decisions, and engage in advanced workforce planning with the aid of modern HR analytics software. By adopting a professional online dashboard, HR professionals gain the ability to closely monitor employee performance, recruitment activities, and talent management processes.

In this article, we are going to tell you everything you need to know about HR Dashboard, including the definition, functions, useful metrics, examples, and most importantly, how to create HR Dashboard effectively by using professional dashboard software.

Feel free to take full advantage of this guide!

What is an HR Dashboard?

An HR dashboard serves as a business intelligence tool empowering Human Resource teams to monitor, analyze, and present HR key performance indicators (KPIs). Contemporary interactive dashboards utilize an HR analytics platform, enabling seamless integration of data from various systems and providing in-depth data exploration directly within the dashboard. This facilitates the rapid identification of valuable insights that can enhance recruitment efforts, streamline workplace management, and boost employee performance.

KPIs and Metrics of an HR Dashboard

A human resources dashboard should incorporate various essential metrics that offer a comprehensive organizational overview. Our platform has published numerous lists of HR Metrics, including recruitment metrics and performance metrics, which can be tailored for specialized dashboards. Some of the common HR metrics for a HR dashboard include:

• Seniority
• Gender: Gender differentiation serves as a significant factor for exploring diversity data (refer to the example HR dashboard below).
• Age: In today’s multigenerational workforce, age has gained prominence. It plays a crucial role in strategic workplace planning and succession planning. Organizations that aim for innovation and restructuring often prioritize age as a focal point.
• Education level: Including educational level should be based on its availability and relevance to the organization’s overarching goals. Otherwise, it may become a ‘vanity metric’ in the HR dashboard.
• Function type: Metrics like function type or function clusters help differentiate various groups within the company. Examples include top management, middle management, production personnel, and support staff.
• Full-Time Equivalent (FTE): FTE represents the hours worked by an employee on a full-time basis. The number of FTEs is usually lower than the total number of employees, especially when part-time workers are present in the organization. FTE provides an accurate measure of the organization’s total workload, and employees working less than 1 FTE are considered part-time workers.
• Employees Active: This metric denotes the number of employees actively working in the organization.
• Turnover rate: Turnover represents the number and/or percentage of employees who left during the previous period. Refer to our guide on calculating employee turnover for more information.
• New hires: This metric indicates the number and/or percentage of new employees who joined the organization within the past year.
• Absence/Absenteeism rate: This metric showcases the average percentage of time employees were absent during the previous period. Another representation of this metric is the total days of absence per employee.
• Cost of absence: While not a standard metric, the cost of absence attaches a financial value to the aforementioned absence rate, making it more tangible.
• Cost of labor: The cost of labor encompasses the total amount an organization pays to its workforce, including employee benefits and payroll taxes. It can be divided into direct and indirect costs. Direct costs are associated with employees contributing to the primary process (e.g., assembly line workers), while indirect costs cannot be directly attributed to a specific level of production (e.g., security personnel guarding the factory).
• Training cost: Training cost represents the total expenditure incurred by a company on training new hires and the existing workforce.
• Recruitment cost: This metric encompasses the overall cost of recruitment efforts, including expenses related to external agencies, job advertisements, and, in some cases, lost productivity. The cost of recruitment extends beyond these factors, such as the cost of management time involved in selection and training, as well as attrition – the duration an employee remains in a position.
• Time to fill: Time to fill refers to the number of days between a position becoming available and a candidate accepting the position. This metric can vary significantly depending on the job type, with software developers, big data analysts, and highly qualified salespeople often posing greater challenges in recruitment compared to entry-level marketers, for instance.

This list is definitively not exhaustive, and other metrics can be included based on specific organizational requirements.

Functions of an HR Dashboard

HR dashboards serve multiple crucial purposes for the HR department:

• Identifying strengths and weaknesses: By consolidating and presenting key metrics that significantly impact organizational success, HR dashboards aid in pinpointing areas of both strengths and weaknesses.
• Facilitating decision-making: Packed with valuable information, HR dashboards play a pivotal role in data-driven strategic decision-making, empowering HR professionals to make informed choices.
• Providing HR analytics: Modern HR technology offers advanced capabilities that assist HR professionals in uncovering valuable insights, identifying trends, and tracking the impact of HR initiatives.
• Ensuring transparency: HR dashboards present essential information in an easily understandable format, offering decision-makers and stakeholders a comprehensive view of an organization’s activities and overall health.

HR Dashboard Examples

The HR dashboard system holds significant importance within your organization, recognizing employees as its most valuable asset. In essence, an effective and practical HR dashboard system provides crucial support for various HR functions, including recruitment, training, performance management, employee information management, and HR event coordination.

Now, let’s delve into the four primary types of HR dashboards, shedding light on their respective functionalities.

Note: These templates have been developed utilizing FineReport, a powerful reporting software that has been honorably mentioned by Gartner Magic Quadrant for ABI Platforms in 2023. It also offers a wide range of HR dashboard templates that are integrated into the software.

You can download FineReport for free and have a try!

Personal Information Management

In day-to-day operations, the HR department is responsible for gathering and organizing employees’ personal information, particularly their work experience and turnover patterns. These data play a crucial role in enabling HR to make informed hiring decisions while enhancing forecasting and planning effectiveness.

For instance, let’s imagine you are a recruiter reviewing the human resource dashboard, which reveals that employees with more experience tend to exhibit higher productivity and stability while reducing risks. Armed with this valuable insight, you can adopt a more rational approach to identifying the right talent and placing them in suitable positions. Similarly, if HR analytics indicates that individuals between the ages of 23 and 25 are more inclined to seek promotional opportunities or higher pay elsewhere, you can pay special attention to this group to mitigate turnover.

Human resources dashboards offer unparalleled insights, empowering the HR team to develop robust hiring and retention strategies that attract qualified employees while minimizing costs.

Using FineReport, it will be much easier for the HR department to collect and input data into a comprehensive system to conduct employee information management thanks to FineReport’s data integration and data entry function.

For data integration, FineReport not only can directly connect to the database and create a centralized data center for all the human resource data but also can be integrated with other business systems like ERP or CRM to update the relevant information in real-time on the human resource dashboard.

For data entry, users can input data directly into the system through the web interface or import data from external sources such as Excel files or databases. FineReport also supports data validation, ensuring data accuracy and integrity. Users can set up validation rules to enforce data consistency and completeness. This helps in preventing errors and maintaining data quality.

General Performance Monitoring Dashboard

In many organizations, it is common to require employees to present their performance on a seasonal or yearly basis for evaluation purposes. However, a recurring issue is the existence of information gaps between decision-makers and employees. This can be attributed to the static nature of presentations, often in the form of slides or PDFs. The process of creating these dashboards is laborious, and the information tends to be subjective and outdated. To address this challenge, the human resources dashboard can offer real-time data, presenting a comprehensive view of employees’ performance with specific key metrics.

For instance, the dashboard image above showcases an overview of attendance and salary information. Utilizing FineReport, HR can easily access employees’ check-in data and customize the dashboard by adding other essential metrics, such as sales performance. With access to real-time data, HR can effectively monitor and manage performance, enhance recruitment and promotion strategies, and proactively address potential issues that could impact the organization.

Segmented Department Analysis

The human resource dashboard goes beyond showcasing individual performance and provides valuable insights into the performance of entire departments. Through the analysis of key metrics, decision-makers gain a quick overview of departmental progress and can evaluate the effectiveness of planning and strategies. This enables them to take timely action by implementing incentives or making necessary adjustments to enhance productivity and ensure efficient growth.

Cost Display and Payment Check

Surprisingly, recruitment costs for companies often exceed initial estimates. The HR department is responsible for reporting all these costs to the financial department. Moreover, HR professionals are tasked with providing employee performance feedback and establishing fair salary structures. This necessitates collecting data from various sources, such as salary records, benefits information, and invoices, and consolidating them into a unified format. However, this process is time-consuming and demanding.

The human resource dashboard serves as a means to organize and present all the essential data related to HR costs and payments. Through an efficient HR dashboard, the HR team can effectively compile information on hiring expenses, salaries, bonuses, fines, and other financial details in a timely manner. This empowers CEOs and HR managers to make well-informed decisions and develop strategic plans for HR initiatives.

How to Create an HR Dashboard Effectively?

When designing human resource dashboards, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of what information should be included. In other words, the dashboard’s content should align with the specific needs of the intended audience. Depending on your objectives, you can consolidate relevant information within a single dashboard or present different sections separately. However, keep in mind that the information provided in the dashboard plays a critical role in the decision-making process. Therefore, it is essential to arrange all necessary information in a concise, clear, and easily understandable manner.

Convey Clear Messages

Delivering clear messages in the HR dashboard is vital. Avoid presenting information without a clear focus, as it can make it challenging to find the necessary information. All information included in the dashboard should be relevant and interconnected. Additionally, the displayed information should be concise and to the point. Avoid including any information that could be misleading.

Provide Accurate Information and Determine the Frequency

Exercise caution when selecting data for inclusion in the dashboard. Inaccurate data can be unfair to employees. Ensure that the data is regularly updated to maintain its freshness. Static and outdated data in HR dashboards create information gaps and can impact the assessment of employees and departments. Some companies prefer to generate dashboards daily, while others opt for weekly updates. The frequency of updates should be based on your specific needs. Selecting the appropriate update frequency is crucial for identifying negative patterns before they spiral out of control. We recommend updating the dashboards no less frequently than monthly to ensure timely proactive actions.

Offer Timely Feedback

After organizing all the information and data, it is advisable to actively communicate with decision-makers to make necessary strategy adjustments. If things are progressing well, sharing progress and ideas with employees can help maintain their engagement and motivation.

Utilize Suitable Dashboard Software

Choose a dashboard software that is suitable for your HR dashboard needs. The right software can streamline the process, enhance data visualization, and provide interactive features for a more effective HR dashboard.

FineReport is an ideal choice for creating HR dashboards due to its robust and versatile dashboard software capabilities. With its user-friendly interface and extensive features, FineReport empowers businesses to design and customize HR dashboards that cater to their specific needs.

• Diverse data visualization options: FineReport supports more than 50 chart styles, covering basically all basic and high-level charts on the market, and also has excellent dynamic effects and a powerful interactive experience. Various features can be set according to the needs during use, and can also be self-adjusted and displayed on the mobile terminal and large LED screen. FineReport enables HR professionals to present HR metrics in visually appealing formats.

• Interactive and dynamic dashboards: FineReport enables users to create interactive dashboards with features like filters, drill-down menus, and clickable elements, enhancing user engagement and facilitating in-depth data analysis.

• Automated reporting: With FineReport, you can save the hr dashboard templates in the platform, and the software will call the templates directly when you need to make reports. Hence, there is no need to create an hr dashboard from the start every time you need a new dashboard.
• Mobile BI Accessibility: FineReport offers mobile BI functionality, allowing users to access and view HR dashboards on the go. With FineReport’s mobile app or responsive design features, HR professionals can conveniently analyze HR metrics and make informed decisions anytime, anywhere, using their mobile devices.

By following these guidelines, you can create an HR dashboard that effectively presents information, supports decision-making, and facilitates communication within the organization.

Summary

In conclusion, an HR dashboard serves as a valuable tool for HR professionals to monitor, analyze, and optimize various HR aspects. By providing real-time insights through data visualization, HR dashboards enable better decision-making, enhance performance monitoring, and facilitate effective communication and collaboration.

FineReport, with its user-friendly interface and customization capabilities, offers a powerful solution for creating comprehensive and visually appealing HR dashboards. Embrace the power of HR dashboards and leverage FineReport to unlock the full potential of your HR management processes.

FineReport is free without time or feature limits for personal use. For enterprises, it offers a quote-based plan that charges according to different situations. In a word, FineBI is price-friendly to all customers. Click the button and try FineReport today!

Feel free to make an appointment for a live demo with our product experts. We will be more clear about your needs and see how FineReport can help you and your organization transform data into value.