Comparing cohort, activity, and snapshot reports

There are a lot of reports in Greenhouse Recruiting, and getting to the right one to answer your question depends on how you want to look at the data. Sometimes it's important to investigate your metrics from different time periods — for example, you may want to see what the pass-through rates were for everyone who applied in Q1. Because everyone applied within the same period, you can accurately track how far that group progressed through the stages of your process.

On the other hand, you may want to see how much activity was done in the last two weeks for your organization. If there was a planned recruiting push, you would want to track what happened in that period and confirm that your overall activity also went up.

When searching for answers to these questions, you may want to look at one of three types of reports — cohort, activity, and snapshot.

Cohort reports

A cohort report groups candidates by a single attribute they all have in common — in Greenhouse reports, that attribute is most commonly the date they applied and entered your system. Grouping candidates this way answers the questions, "What happened to all the candidates that applied during a given day/week/month/year?" By following one set of individuals over their lifetime in the system, you can draw conclusions about who was rejected, how far candidates made it through the pipeline, and the quality of your candidates by recruiter, referrrer, or source — only a Cohort report will show you the narrowing funnel of candidates moving through each stage or milestone in Greenhouse.

The cohort reports in Greenhouse Recruiting include the following:

Activity reports

Activity reports, on the other hand, don't care what your candidates have in common, instead answering the question, "What actually happened in a given day/week/month/year?" How many candidates were moved into each stage, the number of offers created and extended, and which scorecards were submitted all fall under activity reports, since these metrics are much more helpful by the date they happened as opposed to the date the candidates applied.

The activity reports in Greenhouse Recruiting include the following:

Note: The prospecting report actually falls under both the activity and cohort categories, since it has a date applied filter and an activity date filter. This allows you to follow one group of prospects over time to see how many from a specific period eventually became candidates, as well as identify how many prospects have been converted into candidates recently, regardless of when they were first added.

Snapshot reports

Snapshots might be the trickiest reports of the bunch, and also the easiest to get mixed up about. Snapshots take a look at your data at regular intervals (either daily or weekly), allowing you to look back and see a glimpse of what your pipeline or departments looked like at a specific point in the past. You can summarize these reports by day, week, month, or quarter, but each column will only ever show you a single day in the life of your Greenhouse data. This allows you to view your pipeline on the first of every month to see how it changed, every Monday to see if you're making the kind of progress you want to see, or daily to see how many new candidates entered the system. The filter on these reports simply says Date, since it's pulling the snapshots from a given period.

The snapshot reports in Greenhouse Recruiting include the following:

Comparing different report types

If you're exporting your data to excel to mash it up with another report, be sure to only match up reports of the same type. The interviewing activity report and pipeline per job report seem like they might pair up neatly, but one uses the activity filter while the other uses date applied – meaning they are potentially pulling two very different groups of candidates!