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Recruitment Pipeline Tracking Gantt Chart: Manage Hiring Timelines

Track your entire recruitment pipeline with a Gantt chart. Visualize job posting, screening, interviews, offers, and onboarding handoffs across multiple open roles.

Recruitment Pipeline Tracking Gantt Chart: Manage Hiring Timelines

The Problem: Hiring Timelines Slip Without a Shared Visual Plan

Recruiting is a multi-stage process with tight coordination requirements. Hiring managers are waiting on candidates. Recruiters are juggling five open roles. Interview panels need to be assembled and calibrated. Offers expire. Background checks take longer than expected. And leadership wants to know when that senior engineer will start.

Without a visual timeline, recruiting bottlenecks are invisible until they've already caused damage. The engineering team finds out their critical backend role has been stuck in interview scheduling for three weeks. The offer expires before HR processes it. The hiring manager is frustrated, candidates lose interest, and you've wasted months.

A recruitment pipeline tracking Gantt chart makes every stage visible across all open roles simultaneously. gantt-chart.io lets your recruiting team build a hiring timeline in their browser, share it with hiring managers, and update it in real time—no ATS replacement required, no new software to install.

Prerequisites

Before building your recruitment Gantt chart, gather:

  • Open role list: Every role currently being recruited for, with job titles and hiring manager names
  • Target start dates: When does the business need each hire to start?
  • Interview process per role: How many rounds? Who are the interviewers?
  • SLA targets: How many days between each stage (e.g., 3 days to schedule interviews, 48 hours to deliver offer)
  • Offer approval process: Who signs off on compensation? How long does that take?
  • Onboarding handoff requirements: IT provisioning, buddy assignment, first-week schedule
  • A web browser: gantt-chart.io runs in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge

Step-by-Step Instructions

Step 1: Set Up the Hiring Timeline

  1. Open gantt-chart.io and create a new chart
  2. Title it: Q3 2026 Hiring Pipeline or Engineering Recruiting - Open Roles
  3. Set the start date to today and the end date to the furthest expected start date across all roles
  4. Switch to Week view for the clearest recruiting timeline view

Step 2: Add One Task Group Per Open Role

  1. Create a parent task for each open role: Senior Backend Engineer, Product Designer, Account Executive
  2. Set the parent task's start date to when recruiting began and end date to the target start date
  3. Color-code by department: Engineering blue, Design purple, Sales green
  4. Mark the target start date as a milestone for each role so it stands out as the hard deadline

Step 3: Add Pipeline Stage Tasks Under Each Role

For each open role, add child tasks covering:

  1. Job Description Finalized — often overlooked, but JD rewrites delay posting by days
  2. Job Posted (All Channels) — LinkedIn, job boards, internal referral program
  3. Initial Screening (Recruiter Phone Calls) — set a duration based on your expected applicant volume
  4. Hiring Manager Resume Review — 2-3 business days max; make this explicit
  5. Interview Round 1 (Technical/Skills Screen) — set scheduling and completion window
  6. Interview Round 2 (Panel/Culture Fit) — who's on the panel? Add their names in the notes
  7. Reference Checks — often runs in parallel with final rounds
  8. Offer Approval — internal compensation approval; this is frequently the hidden bottleneck
  9. Offer Extended and Accepted — mark as milestone
  10. Background Check — typically 5-10 business days
  11. Onboarding Handoff to HR/IT — laptop provisioning, accounts, first-week schedule

Step 4: Link Stage Dependencies

  1. Each stage should depend on the previous stage completing
  2. Exceptions: Reference checks can run parallel to final round interviews; offer preparation can start before final-round completion if you're confident in the candidate
  3. Make offer approval an explicit dependency—recruiters often forget that compensation sign-off takes 2-3 days

Step 5: Assign Owners to Each Stage

  1. Assign the recruiter to sourcing, screening, and coordination stages
  2. Assign the hiring manager to their resume review and interview stages
  3. Assign HR operations to background check and onboarding handoff tasks
  4. Share the chart link with all hiring managers—they can see exactly where their roles stand without asking

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Mistake 1: Not Tracking Time-to-Fill by Stage

What happens: You know hiring is slow, but you don't know where. Is it slow sourcing? Slow hiring manager review? Slow offer approval? You can't fix what you can't see.

How to avoid it: Track actual vs. planned dates for each stage. When a stage takes longer than the planned duration, update the task end date in the chart. Over time, you'll see which stages consistently run over and can fix the process there.

Mistake 2: Ignoring Offer Approval as a Task

What happens: The recruiter is ready to extend an offer on Thursday. Compensation sign-off takes four business days. The candidate accepts another offer on Monday.

How to avoid it: Add offer approval as an explicit task with a duration of three to five business days. Start this task as soon as you're confident in the final candidate—don't wait for the final interview to conclude.

Mistake 3: No Onboarding Handoff Task

What happens: The candidate signs the offer and their start date is in two weeks. IT doesn't know to provision a laptop. The hiring manager hasn't built a first-week schedule. The new hire shows up with nothing to do.

How to avoid it: Add a formal Onboarding Handoff task after offer acceptance. Include in the notes: laptop request submitted, email alias created, first-week agenda drafted, buddy assigned. Assign this to HR ops and the hiring manager jointly.

Mistake 4: Running All Roles in Separate Docs

What happens: The senior engineer role is in a spreadsheet, the designer role is in an email thread, and the AE role exists only in the recruiter's memory. Leadership can't get a cross-role view of hiring progress.

How to avoid it: All open roles in a single Gantt chart. One shared link. Leadership gets a one-glance view of all active recruiting timelines without scheduling a recruiting sync.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How is a Gantt chart different from an ATS for tracking recruiting?

A: Your ATS tracks candidate-level data: applications, resume scores, interview feedback, offer letters. A Gantt chart tracks time: when each hiring stage is planned to start and end, how roles compare across the portfolio, and where deadlines are. They complement each other—use the ATS for candidate management, use gantt-chart.io for timeline visibility.

Q: Can I track multiple roles across different departments in one chart?

A: Yes. Create one task group per role. Color-code by department. You'll immediately see which departments are furthest behind on their hiring timelines and which roles are at risk of missing target start dates.

Q: How do I show the chart to a hiring manager who's not technical?

A: Share the gantt-chart.io link—no login required to view. The visual is self-explanatory: their role is a row, the stages are tasks, and the milestone diamond shows their target start date. Most hiring managers can read it immediately.

Q: What happens when a candidate drops out mid-pipeline?

A: Update the chart to reflect restarting from the screening stage. Move the target start date milestone to the right to reflect the expected delay. This makes the business impact of a dropped candidate immediately visible to leadership.

Q: How far in advance should I build the hiring Gantt chart?

A: Build it as soon as headcount is approved. Even if the job description isn't finalized, start the chart with a placeholder task for JD creation. The earlier the timeline is visible, the earlier you spot bottlenecks.

Summary: Recruitment Pipeline Tracking Done Right

Hiring delays are expensive—for the business and for the recruiting team's credibility. A visual pipeline timeline prevents the invisible bottlenecks that kill time-to-fill. Here's the complete approach:

  1. Create one task group per open role with a target start date milestone
  2. Add pipeline stages as child tasks: posting, screening, interviews, offer, background check, onboarding handoff
  3. Link stage dependencies so slippage propagates visually
  4. Assign owners at each stage: recruiter, hiring manager, HR ops
  5. Track actual vs. planned by updating task dates when stages run over
  6. Share the chart with hiring managers so they have real-time visibility without recurring recruiting syncs

gantt-chart.io is free, browser-based, and requires no sign-up. Build your hiring pipeline timeline today and give leadership the visibility they keep asking for.