3 Quick Custom Recruiting Reports

Workday Recruiting is a veritable gold mine for custom reporting; rife with variables, daily injections of new data, and nuanced company-specific metrics. With that being said, I’d like to share with you 3 custom reports focusing on Candidate data for Workday Recruiting.

Those reports are:

Candidates by Stage

Candidates by Step

Candidate Applications by Week

Are these three reports going to cover all your Recruiting reporting needs? Unlikely. BUT the three reports above are an excellent combination of easy-to-build and valuable-to-have. The juice is worth the squeeze, if you will. Especially if report-building in Workday is unfamiliar territory.

While the Recruiting Hub is excellent and worth leveraging if you aren’t already, circumstances arise where we need to report on candidate data in aggregate for non-Recruiters. Or share data beyond the immediate Recruiting team without giving over the keys to the kingdom. Or we want to customize our data lens beyond what the Recruiting Hub functionality allows.

If any of these pain-points sound familiar, this trio of custom reports might come in handy.

Candidates by Stage

Type: Matrix

Data Source: Job Applications

Purpose: Display an aggregate count of all active job applications and what stage of the application process that application is presently in (Review, Screen, Interview, Offer, etc.)

Why I like it: Get a quick snapshot of high-level recruiting activity across every job requisition. This report can give us a sense of how busy our Recruiting team is likely to be in the coming weeks, and what sort of support will be needed for a sourcing-heavy vs. interview-heavy period.

How Do I Build It?

You will only need to fill in the Row Grouping section for this one with report field = Candidate Stage. No Column Grouping required (unless you want to get fancy and inject another variable to see candidate stage by candidate type or recruiter (or anything, really).

The Detail Data can be anything you’d like to see when you click on the blue numbers displaying in your report. If you’re not sure, the fields pictured below are an excellent place to start!

There are no filters or required prompts but if you find the dispositioned candidate data volume overwhelming, please feel free to pop in a filter of Candidate Stage > not in the selection list > Rejected, Declined by Candidate to exclude them.

For the output, I’ve gone with the “Chart and Table” donut. I usually (read: always) prefer a visual but you can leave it at just a table. There are additional graphic options so feel free to explore!

And voilà – we’ve got ourselves a custom report on Candidate Status!

Candidates by Step

Type: Matrix

Data Source: Job Applications

Purpose: Display an aggregate count of all active job applications and what specific step of the application process that application is presently in (Manager Screen, Recruiting Screen, 2nd Interview, Make New Offer, etc.)

Why I like it: This report is excellent for identifying delays or bottlenecks that slow down your recruiting process so you can be proactive about providing support and moving things along.

How Do I Build it?

Almost exactly the same way we built the first one. So much so, I encourage you to copy the Candidate Status report we’ve just built and save yourself some time.

The only thing we need to change is our Row Grouping. Instead of Candidate Stage, select Job Application Step. This field captures any step label overrides we may be using within BP: Job Application, 1^st Interview vs. 2^nd Interview; Manager Screen vs. Recruiter Screen.

No column grouping necessary but feel free to add additional variables if you want to highlight different cohorts of applicants (EX: internal vs. external vs. agency).

Every other tab will be exactly the same as our previous report for Candidate Stage, so if you did go ahead and “copy,” your done! Just be sure to check the Share tab, this will always return to the default of shared with only you.

And just like that, we’ve got our second custom recruiting report!

Candidate Applications by Week

Type: Matrix

Data Source: Job Applications

Purpose: Display a weekly rollup (this can be any range of time – quarterly, monthly, etc.) of Candidate Applications that have been submitted.

Why I like it: Track how well you are performing following any new recruitment promotions/initiatives. See the aggregate application volume in real-time to coordinate staffing and coverage appropriately.

For this report, our Row Grouping is going to be a calculated field (dun dun dun!) on Added Date (aka Application Date). But fear not! It’s one level, straight-forward, and will allow us to bundle our application dates into the same week (or whatever timeframe aggregate speaks to you).

Our calc field type is going to be a Lookup Date Rollup, with our date field being Added Date. The format drop-down is where you can deviate from my “week” if you’d like to do a different summation.

Once you create this calc field and pop it into our Row Grouping, we are just about done! I’d suggest following the same pattern for the detail data and filters you’ve selected on our previous two custom reports on Candidates.

The main difference, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is that I’ve ditched the donut. Instead, I pick a Bar-Clustered with our calculated date rollup occupying the vertical axis and my count summarization occupying the Legend.

As an aside, you can flip your vertical axis and legend to get more colors involved in your report output. I like the additional colors, but not as much as I dislike my dates being in the legend instead of running down the vertical axis. But entirely personal preference, the numbers remain the same.

One final thing – if you intend to add these custom reports to a dashboard, be sure to identify that dashboard in the Output tab > Worklet Options and share the report with at least one security group.