Most recruitment agencies don’t have a data problem. They have a “the numbers live in five places and nobody trusts them” problem. The CRM holds the roles, the spreadsheet holds the forecast, the finance system holds the fees, and the real picture lives in the heads of your best consultants until someone asks on Monday morning.
A good reporting dashboard fixes that by answering one question at a glance: are we going to hit the number, and if not, where is it stuck? Here’s what belongs on it – and what doesn’t.
The 8 numbers worth putting on the dashboard
1. Live roles, by client and by consultant
The starting point for everything else. Show how many roles are open, how old they are, and who owns them. A role that has been open for six weeks with no shortlist is a conversation you need to have this week, not at the quarterly review.
2. Candidates in play
Not the size of your database – the number of candidates actively moving through a process right now. If this drops while live roles stay flat, sourcing has stalled and next month’s placements will show it.
3. Stage conversion rates
CV sent to interview, interview to offer, offer to placement. These ratios tell you where deals die. Low CV-to-interview usually means a briefing or matching problem; low offer-to-placement often points to counter-offers or weak candidate control.
4. Time to shortlist
How long from a brief landing to a credible shortlist going to the client. Speed wins contingent roles. If the right candidates are already in your CRM but it still takes days to find them, that is a search and matching problem, not a market one.
5. Pipeline value and fees forecast
Weight each live deal by its stage and expected fee, and you get a forecast you can plan hiring and cash flow around. It doesn’t need to be perfect – it needs to be updated automatically, so it is never a week out of date.
6. Placements and fees, against target
The outcome measures, shown by month, by desk and by consultant. Put the target line on the chart. A number without a target is just a number.
7. Consultant activity that leads to revenue
Calls and emails on their own are a poor guide. Track the activity that actually moves deals: client meetings, new roles won, interviews arranged. Leaderboards work when they reward these, and backfire when they reward volume.
8. Client health
Which clients are giving you more roles, which have gone quiet, and which ones you haven’t spoken to in a month. Re-engaging a lapsed client is almost always cheaper than winning a new one.
What to leave off
- Database size. A bigger database doesn’t mean more placements. Freshness and reachability matter more than the total.
- Raw activity counts. 80 calls a day tells you someone is busy, not that anything is moving.
- Email open rates. Privacy features and corporate filters make opens unreliable. Track replies and meetings instead – our deliverability checklist explains why.
- Anything nobody acts on. If a chart hasn’t changed a decision in three months, take it off.
Where the data should come from
The dashboard is only as good as what feeds it. Pull roles, candidates and stages straight from your recruitment CRM, fees from finance, and campaign results from your outreach platform – automatically, not by someone exporting spreadsheets on a Friday. If parts of your stack don’t talk to each other, fix that first; a dashboard built on manual updates will be abandoned within a quarter.
Where to start
Pick four of the eight – live roles, stage conversion, fees forecast and placements against target cover most agencies – and get them updating automatically. Add the rest once the team trusts the numbers.
If you’d rather not build it yourself, Pulse+ for recruitment agencies brings pipeline visibility, brief matching, leaderboards and RevOps reporting into one live view, built on your existing CRM and data. For the wider picture across marketing and sales, see the Pulse+ performance dashboard. Book a 20-minute call and we’ll show it running on numbers like yours.
