Vacancy Requisition Tracker

What this tool does

CM8-354 tracks vacancies from the day somebody decides a post is needed to the day the new person starts. It records six dates, splits the elapsed time into the four stages between them, measures approval delay against your own target, prices each post with employer costs on top, and adds up what the waiting is costing while a replacement post sits empty.

Everything runs inside this single file — no account, no upload, no network request of any kind.

What it deliberately is not

This is not an applicant tracking system. It holds no candidate names, no applications, no scores and no correspondence. It is about the post, not the people applying for it, and that boundary is deliberate: a register of posts can sit with a manager or a finance director without any of the data protection weight that comes with holding applicant records.

Use it alongside a pipeline tracker and an interview scorecard, which handle the candidate side.

What one row is

One row is one post to be filled. Recruiting three operatives on one requisition is three rows if you want to know when each started, and one row if you genuinely treat it as a single event. Prefer three: the averages are meaningless otherwise, and one late start is invisible inside a batch.

The six dates, and why each one matters

• Raised — the day somebody decided the post was needed. Not the day the form was finished. This is the date managers measure from, and it is the honest start of the clock.
• Submitted — the form went for approval. The gap from raised to submitted is time spent writing a business case, and it is real.
• Decided — approved or rejected. Record it for rejections too; a rejection that took five weeks is worth knowing about.
• Advertised — the post went to market. The gap from approval to advertising is dead time and it is embarrassingly common.
• Offer accepted — the recruiting is done.
• Started — the post is actually filled. Notice periods live between these last two and are largely outside your control.

Where the time goes

The stacked chart shows all four. The reason it is the first chart is that most organisations measure only the recruiting bar, report a respectable time-to-hire, and cannot understand why hiring managers say it takes forever. The manager is counting from the day they knew they needed somebody.

Two of those four bars are entirely within your own control and cost nothing to fix.

Approval delay

Approval time is measured from submission to decision, and where a requisition is still waiting it counts to today — so a post stuck for seven weeks shows as seven weeks rather than as a blank.

Look at what correlates with a long approval in your own data. In the sample it is whether the post was in the headcount budget: budgeted posts are decided in days and unbudgeted ones take weeks, because they go somewhere else. That is a fixable process problem and it is invisible unless somebody records the two dates.

What a post costs

The salary used is the agreed figure once there is one, and the budgeted figure until then, so the commitment total is meaningful while posts are still open.

A single employer-cost percentage is a simplification. Real employer costs vary by country, by salary band and by which benefits somebody takes, and several are stepped rather than proportional. For comparing posts and totalling a commitment it is close enough; for a budget submission, use your finance team's figures.

The cost of waiting

This applies to replacement, backfill, conversion and temporary posts only. Growth posts are excluded and always show zero, because a position that has never existed is not costing you anything by not existing — claiming otherwise is how a recruitment case loses its credibility.

For a filled post the figure is frozen at the total lead time. For an open one it keeps counting, which is the point: it is a number that grows on a report every week until somebody acts.

Budgeted and unbudgeted posts

The headcount budget tick is worth keeping honest, because it is the single best predictor of how long approval will take and it changes what the conversation should be. An unbudgeted post is not a recruitment question at all — it is a financial decision that happens to be expressed as a vacancy — and treating it as recruitment is why it sits for six weeks.

The positions the tool works out

• Stuck in approval — submitted, past your approval target, no decision.
• Never submitted — raised more than a fortnight ago and still a draft. Usually means the manager gave up rather than that the need went away.
• Approved, not advertised — the permission exists and nothing has happened. The most wasteful state in the whole process.
• Past the date it was needed — the needed-by date has gone and nobody has accepted an offer.
• Awaiting start — offer accepted, working notice. Nothing to do but plan the handover.

Limits worth knowing

• Elapsed days are calendar days, not working days. A requisition submitted before a holiday period will look worse than one submitted in March, and it should — the post is empty either way.
• Averages here include only requisitions with the relevant dates filled in. A partly completed register produces flattering averages.
• It does not know about internal candidates, redeployment obligations, or any consultation process that must happen before a post can be advertised.
• It does not track offers declined. A post that goes to offer twice shows as one long recruiting stage, which understates how hard it was.

Printing and sharing

The Report tab prints the tiles, charts and both tables with a title block you fill in. Filter to one department before printing for a management meeting, or to open requisitions for a weekly review.

Saving your work

The register is held in this browser, on this computer, and stays there between visits. Use the backup button to write a JSON file you control; the spreadsheet download gives you the same rows for a finance review.

Accuracy & disclaimer

Every date, salary and cost figure here is yours. The tool subtracts dates and multiplies percentages; it has no view about whether a post is justified, whether a salary is right, or whether an approval was reasonable. Employment law, consultation requirements and equal pay obligations are outside this tool entirely.