What was wrong
Leadership couldn't answer basic questions about hiring. How many people applied this month? How many got to interview? How many offers went out? How many actually started?
Every one of those questions meant asking HR to go build a report by hand. So the questions got asked less often than they should have.
What I did
Worked on a centralized analytics view of the recruiting funnel: applied, interviewed, offered, hired, and how those change over time. Executives get visibility without a request, and the business can look at hiring outcomes historically instead of only right now.
Leadership answers its own recruiting questions. HR stops producing reports on request.
What I learned
When getting an answer is expensive, people stop asking the question. Making it cheap changes what leadership even thinks to look at.