Driving Workforce Insights Through Data


When designing this internal HR dashboard, I wanted to create a tool that HR and operations leaders could use to monitor, understand, and act on workforce trends. The dashboard tracks active headcount, hiring trends, separations, turnover, tenure, ethnicity representation, and more—all built in Excel to ensure broad accessibility and functionality for non-technical users.

The goal in recreating this dashboard was to provide a view of what potential HR leadership may want when seeking a comprehensive overview of workforce dynamics. My focus was on transparency, simplicity, drill-down usability, and to expand use over time.

Key questions I aimed to answer included:

  • What are our trends in new hires and separations year-over-year?

  • Where are we seeing high turnover— is it seasonal or role-based?

  • How is our employee makeup changing across tenure, employment type, and location?

  • Are there equity or representation gaps that need deeper exploration?


Dashboard Highlights

The dashboard is structured around major HR metrics, displayed in clean and digestible formats:

  • Excel Dashboards: Used pivot tables, slicers, conditional formatting, and dynamic named ranges to create an interactive experience

  • Data Structuring: Consolidated fragmented time series and categorized separation reasons

  • User-Centered Design: Prioritized layout clarity and accessible visualizations for non-technical HR users

1. Headline Metrics

By starting with these headline metrics, I aimed to provide a clear, concise overview that gives immediate context to everything else in the dashboard—like a health check for the organization’s human capital. This area was created for a quick look at top-line figures for the HR Department including:

  • Total employees

  • Breakdown by hourly/salary

  • Full-time vs. part-time ratios

  • Gender split

  • Turnover rates

2. Active Employees & Hiring Trends

Separating the active employees and calculating the differences in tenure to ensure that the totals are reflective of actual totals of active employees without being counted for each month.

  • Monthly new hire tracking

  • Rolling headcount totals

  • Quarterly/annual trends

3. Separations & Termination Reasons

In this initial pivot table, I separated the separation issues to ensure that we are calculating the termination reason properly as well as offering context to the reason for leaving the company.

  • Year-over-year separations and bad hires

  • Custom term reason categories (e.g., voluntary, involuntary, retirement, etc.)

4. Demographics & Diversity

Added a layer of context for breakdown of employees based on EOE standards and allowing for accountability where needed.

  • Ethnicity breakdowns

  • Gender representation

  • Region-specific comparisons

5. Tenure Distribution

How long are people are sticking around? This allows for further exploration of employee satisfaction and keeping a robust staff.

  • Visual breakdown of short-term vs. long-term employees

  • Helps anticipate future retention risks


Key Takeaways for Business Leaders

This dashboard enables HR teams to:

  • Quickly assess hiring gaps or overextensions

  • Track retention and turnover patterns with historical context

  • Spot diversity or representation imbalances

  • Make strategic staffing decisions grounded in data, not assumptions

 

What This Says About My BI Approach

This project highlights my ability to:

  • Translate business problems into BI solutions

  • Build accessible tools in environments familiar to end-users

  • Think strategically about not just what data is shown, but why it matters

  • Create intuitive dashboards that don’t require an instruction manual

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