Excel + Google Sheets · Tested builds

Recruiting & Hiring Templates for Excel and Google Sheets

This category covers hiring in a spreadsheet: a paid Recruitment Dashboard that tracks candidates through your stages and calculates time-to-hire and cost-per-hire, plus free templates for recruitment budgeting, onboarding checklists and employee records. Every file is generated and tested programmatically, in matching Excel and Google Sheets builds, no macros.

Applicant tracking systems are priced for companies hiring continuously. A small team filling two or three roles a year is usually tracking candidates in a spreadsheet anyway, and the honest question is whether that spreadsheet tells you anything beyond who applied. Most homemade hiring sheets are a candidate list with a status column: useful as a record, useless as a measurement.

What turns a candidate list into a hiring tracker is the arithmetic on top of it — how many candidates each source actually converts, how long a role really takes to fill from the day it opened, and what each hire cost. Those are the numbers that tell you where to spend the next posting budget, and they are all computable from dates and stages you are already writing down.

Premium templates

$29

Recruitment Dashboard & Hiring Tracker

Candidate pipeline with time-to-hire, cost-per-hire and source effectiveness

Free templates

Free

Free Employee Database Template (Excel)

Guides

Guide

Best Recruitment Dashboard Excel Templates (2026)

What a recruiting spreadsheet should compute for you

Three measures do most of the work. Time-to-hire is the gap between the application date and the start date, averaged across hires — it tells you how early to open a requisition. Source effectiveness is the share of candidates from each channel that reach an offer, which is what separates a source that delivers volume from one that delivers hires. Cost-per-hire divides what you spent on postings and agencies by the number of people who actually started.

The fourth is the funnel itself: how many candidates sit at each stage, and what proportion of them pass to the next one. A funnel that loses most candidates at the phone screen is telling you something different from one that loses them at the offer stage, and neither is visible in a plain list.

When a spreadsheet stops being the right tool

A spreadsheet holds up while one person owns the hiring process and candidates are counted in dozens. It stops holding up when several recruiters need to write to the same file at once, when candidates must be emailed from inside the system, or when you need an audit trail of who changed what. At that point an applicant tracking system earns its subscription, and the honest advice is to move.

Until then, the tracking itself is arithmetic, and arithmetic is what a spreadsheet does well.

Frequently asked questions

Do these recruiting templates work in Google Sheets?

Yes. Every file is built in matching Excel and Google Sheets versions, and the Sheets build avoids functions that only exist in Excel, so the formulas behave the same in both.

Is there a free hiring tracker?

Yes. The free recruitment dashboard template covers candidate tracking, and there are free templates for recruitment budgeting and onboarding checklists in this category. The paid Recruitment Dashboard adds the requisition view, the pipeline funnel and the cost-per-hire and source effectiveness calculations.

Do the templates contain macros?

No. There is no VBA and no macros in any file, which is also why they open unchanged in Google Sheets. Every formula is visible and editable in the cell.