How to Create an HR Dashboard in Google Analytics

Your careers page and company intranet are powerful hubs of activity, but without the right lens, their full potential remains untapped. Instead of guessing which job boards bring in the best candidates or wondering if employees are reading the latest policy updates, you can use a tool you probably already have: Google Analytics. This guide will walk you through how to transform your GA data into a dynamic HR dashboard for tracking key recruitment and employee engagement metrics.

Why Use Google Analytics for HR Reporting?

While Google Analytics (GA) is most famous as a marketing tool, its ability to track website behavior is incredibly versatile. For HR professionals, it offers a budget-friendly way to apply data analysis to people-centric processes. You don't need to purchase a specialized, expensive HR analytics suite to get started.

By connecting GA to your careers page or company intranet, you can:

Turn Recruitment into a Measurable Funnel: See exactly where your applicants are coming from, which job postings get the most views, and where candidates drop off in the application process.
Uncover Employee Engagement Insights: Find out which internal communications and resources employees use most, identify knowledge gaps based on their search queries, and see if a new company policy is actually being read.
Make Data-Informed Decisions: Replace anecdotes and gut feelings with hard numbers. Back up your requests for a bigger recruitment budget or a simplified internal process with clear, visual data.

Using GA flips the switch from simply managing HR tasks to strategically improving them based on real human behavior.

Getting Started: What You'll Need

Before building your awesome new dashboard, make sure you have a few key things in place. The good news is that these are all free Google tools.

Google Analytics 4: You'll need GA4 installed on your company website (specifically your careers pages) and, if possible, your company intranet. Most modern websites have this set up almost by default.
Access Rights: Make sure you have Editor-level access to your company's Google Analytics property. You might need to ask your marketing or IT team for permission.
Looker Studio (Formerly Data Studio): This is Google’s free data visualization tool. It's where you'll build your dashboard. All you need is a Google account to use it.
Google Tag Manager (Recommended): While technically optional, Google Tag Manager (GTM) is the easiest way to track specific HR-related actions, like application submissions. We'll touch on why this is so important in a bit.

Key HR Metrics to Track in Google Analytics

Once your tools are in place, the first step is to decide what you want to measure. You can track dozens of things, but it’s best to start with the goals that have the biggest impact. We can group these into two main areas.

Recruitment & Talent Acquisition

Your careers page is your digital recruitment hub. Here’s what you can measure to optimize your talent pipeline:

Careers Page & Job Post Views: How many people are visiting specific job listings? Which roles are getting the most attention? This helps you understand initial candidate interest.
Top Applicant Sources: Where do your candidates come from? A dashboard can visualize traffic from LinkedIn, Indeed, professional forums, social media, or direct company promotion.
Geographic Location of Candidates: Use a map visualization to see if your talent search for remote roles is truly global or where your strongest local talent pools are.
Application Conversion Rate: This is a big one. What percentage of people who view a job posting go on to submit an application?
Mobile vs. Desktop Applicants: Is your application process unfriendly to mobile users? If you see high traffic from phones but few completed applications, you might have an issue.

Internal Comms & Employee Engagement

If your GA4 tracking code is on your employee intranet or a password-protected resource portal, you can gather valuable engagement data:

Intranet Users: How many employees actively use your internal resources? Is engagement going up or down over time?
Most Viewed Content: Identify which pages, policy documents, or announcements are most popular. This can tell you what’s top of mind for your team.
Resource Downloads: Track clicks on specific PDFs or documents, like the employee handbook or benefits overviews.
Internal Site Search: See what terms employees are searching for on your intranet. If “holiday schedule” or “expense policy” are common searches, you might need to make that information more prominent.

The Secret Weapon: Setting Up Custom Events

Out of the box, Google Analytics tracks standard activities like page views, sessions, and clicks. However, it doesn't know what a uniquely valuable HR action - like an application submission - is. We need to teach it. The best way to do this is with Custom Events via Google Tag Manager (GTM).

Think of GTM as a middle layer that lets you tell Google Analytics when something specific and important happens. For our HR dashboard, the most crucial event to set up is application_submitted.

Here’s a simplified overview of how you’d set this up in GTM:

Define the Trigger: The "Trigger" is the action that causes your event to fire. The easiest trigger is a "Page View" of the 'Application Successful' or 'Thank You' page that a candidate sees immediately after applying. This URL is unique and confirms a submission.
Create the Tag: In GTM, you'll create a new "GA4 Event" tag. You get to name the event yourself - let's call it application_submitted.
Link Tag and Trigger: You'll configure the tag to fire whenever the 'Thank You' page trigger occurs.
Test and Publish: Use GTM’s Preview mode to submit a test application and ensure your new event 'fires' correctly. Once confirmed, publish the changes.

It sounds a bit technical, but there are countless free tutorials available. Getting this one event set up is the key to unlocking true recruitment funnel tracking.

Step-by-Step: Build Your HR Dashboard in Looker Studio

While you can view some data directly in GA4's reporting interface, Looker Studio gives you a drag-and-drop 'canvas' to design a polished, shareable dashboard that tells a clear story. Let’s build it.

Step 1: Connect Your Data Source

Navigate to lookerstudio.google.com and click on "Blank Report."
You’ll be asked to connect a data source. Select "Google Analytics."
Authorize your Google account, then find your Account and GA4 Property from the list. Click "Add."
You now have a blank report with a live connection to your GA4 data.

Step 2: Build the Recruitment Dashboard Widgets

Now for the fun part. Let's add charts and scorecards to visualize your recruiting pipeline. For each widget you add, it's a good practice to use Looker Studio's filtering options to include only data from pages that contain /careers/ or your specific career page URL in the Page Path.

Key Scorecards: From the menu, select "Add a chart" > "Scorecard." Create three separate scorecards for these metrics: "Sessions," "Total Users," and your custom "Event count" for application_submitted. This gives you a high-level view of activity.
Applicant Sources: Add a "Bar chart." Set the "Dimension" to Session source / medium and the "Metric" to Sessions. This will beautifully show you which channels are driving the most traffic.
Applicant Location Map: Add a "Geo chart." Set the "Location" to City or Country and let "Sessions" be the metric. You'll instantly see a heat map of where your candidates are viewing your jobs.
Application Funnel: Add a "Table." For your dimensions, add Page Path. For your metrics, use Views and Event Count (filtered for your application event). This gives you a simple funnel showing views of job pages vs. actual applications.

Step 3: Build the Employee Engagement Dashboard Widgets

You can create a separate page in the same Looker Studio report for your intranet data. The process is similar, but you'll filter your charts to the subdomain or subfolder of your intranet (e.g., filter for Page Hostname = "intranet.yourcompany.com").

Popular Resources: Add a "Table." Set the dimension to Page Title and the metric to Views. Sort descending to see the most-visited pages at the top.
Resource Downloads: If you've been tracking file downloads (a standard event GA4 can track automatically), add a table with the dimension File name and the metric Event count (filtered by the file_download event) to see which documents are most popular.

Step 4: Customize and Share

You can add text blocks to title your charts, add your company logo, and adjust date ranges. Once it’s ready, use the "Share" button in Looker Studio to give link access to stakeholders. The best part? The data is always live, so you never have to manually update it again.

Final Thoughts

Building an HR dashboard with Google Analytics and Looker Studio is a fantastic, no-cost way to get more strategic about your recruitment and internal communication efforts. It provides a simple foundation for measuring what matters, helping you shift from reactionary tasks to proactive, data-driven improvements in your people operations.

Once you get a taste for automated real-time reporting, the old way of downloading CSVs and building manual reports in spreadsheets starts to feel painfully slow. At this point, we designed Graphed to completely remove the setup and dashboard building friction. Instead of navigating an array of menus in GTM and Looker Studio, we let you connect data sources like Google Analytics with a single click and then just ask for what you need in plain English - like, "Build a dashboard showing our job application conversion rate by traffic source for the last quarter." It’s designed to provide you with the answers in seconds, not hours.