Recruiting template

Hiring goes wrong quietly. Nobody decides to leave a strong candidate sitting for eleven days after their technical round; it just happens because the pipeline lives in one person's inbox. This template puts roles, candidates and interview rounds in linked tables and derives days-in-stage from the dates already on the row, so the funnel shows you where people are stalling instead of only where they ended up.

Roles keeps one row per open position: the title, the department, the hiring manager, how many seats it has to fill, a status and the date it opened. Read one aloud: Senior Backend Engineer, Engineering, Ana, two openings, Open, 9 Jan. Candidates is one row per person applying, linked to the role they applied for, with the stage they're at, where they came from, the date they applied, and a Days in stage column that's a formula rather than a number anybody maintains. Interviews holds one row per round per candidate, linked back to the candidate, carrying the round, the interviewer, the date, a score and the notes: strong on systems, light on testing.

Nobody decides to leave a strong candidate sitting for eleven days after their technical round. It happens because nothing in the process is counting, and because the pipeline lives in an inbox where nothing carries a date. Days in stage counts without anyone remembering to update it: the difference between a funnel that shows where people ended up and one that shows where they're stuck right now. Interview notes work the same way: written on the interview row, they're still there after the person who wrote them has left.

The drop-off between screen and technical is usually the one worth arguing about, and Funnel by role is where you see it: how many people sit at each stage for each opening, and what fraction get through. Time in stage gives the average wait at each step, then lists, by name, the candidates currently over it. A report that ends in a name gets acted on; a report that ends in a percentage gets noted. Both draw on the sample candidates the workspace ships with.

Where are candidates dropping out of the funnel is a question about stages and counts. Which candidates have sat in the same stage for more than ten days comes straight off the formula column and ends in a list of people to chase. How long a hire takes from application to offer, by role, runs the applied date against the interview rounds that followed. And which source gives us hires rather than just applicants decides where next quarter's referral budget goes.

Every company runs a different loop, so treat these stages as scaffolding rather than law. Add one, rename one, or split technical into two rounds. Ferra moves the candidates already sitting in them rather than leaving anyone stageless. The addition teams reach for first is structured feedback: a Scorecards table with one row per interviewer per round, and the debrief stops living in email threads and starts being something you can compare across candidates.

The center of the target is a company hiring for a handful of roles at a time without an applicant tracking system. It also works for an agency running searches for clients, or for a hiring manager handed a spreadsheet and a shortlist. A full ATS with job boards, careers-page publishing and offer approvals wired in won't be replaced by this, but the reporting that ATS makes hard to extract has a reasonable home here.

Roles go in first, so candidates have something to link to. Then the people: a CSV or XLSX export goes in as-is, a connected Google Sheet keeps updating if someone else maintains the list, and a forwarded email can be read into a table. Say which column names the role and the relationship is set from that: no matching text by hand.