Embedded reporting: ready-to-send PDFs, straight from the job

Every HR person or recruiter knows the drill. A hiring manager or client asks “how’s it going?” and you lose an afternoon assembling a report: pulling numbers together in Excel, writing a few summaries, some commentary in Word, exporting to PDF, emailing it over. The following week the same question lands and you start from scratch.

That cycle is why reporting usually feels like an afterthought. The data is there, but the report — lives in three other apps.

With today’s release, reporting has moved inside Selectify. You build a template, pin it to a job, and it runs on a schedule — straight to the recipient’s inbox as a PDF.

#Why this is in the product, not next to it

We thought hard about the cheap route: a CSV export. Ship download.csv and let the customer puzzle it out in Excel themselves.

Two things held us back:

1. Recruitment reports aren’t tables. A report isn’t “here are 412 rows, figure it out”. It’s a short, narrative document — a cover page, a handful of key metrics, a pipeline breakdown, maybe a shortlist with DISC-driven notes. None of that fits in a CSV, and rebuilding it by hand every week was exactly what made our pilot users miss deadlines.
2. The data already has shape. Selectify already knows which candidates are on a job, what stage they’re in, how long they’ve been there, what their fit score is, what your team thought of them. Every number a report needs is already in the system. Re-exporting it to rebuild it elsewhere is wasted effort.

So we put the report down as a first-class object, alongside the candidate pool and the plan to work it.

#How you build a report

Reports are built from sections. Each section is a block with its own layout and data — eight of them today:

• Cover page — branding, logo, job title, date range, table of contents.
• Key metrics — totals, additions this period, scheduled interviews, average fit score.
• Pipeline breakdown — candidates per status stage, with a visual pipeline bar.
• Time in stage — average days active candidates have spent in each stage.
• Activity metrics — added / rejected counts, interviews, messages, insights completed.
• Timeline — chronological list of interviews and candidate additions.
• Top candidates — shortlisted candidates with scores, strengths, and profile summaries.
• Custom text — a freeform block for your own notes, recommendations, or disclaimers.

You drag them into the order you want, fill in the content where needed (for custom text blocks), and save. The result is a ReportConfig — a reusable template. Five ready-to-use templates ship with the product — Weekly Client Update, Executive Summary, Full Activity Report, Candidate Shortlist, Progress & Timeline — so most teams never need to build one from scratch.

#Scheduling

Once the template exists, a report plan pins it to a job, a cadence, and a list of recipients. The scheduler supports Outlook-style planning: weekly (including multiple days), biweekly, monthly by day-of-month or nth-weekday.

At the scheduled moment the system generates the PDF against the job’s current state, and the delivery goes out by email or download-only — depending on the setting. Every generated report is kept — per plan you get a history of when it went out, to whom, and a link to download the exact PDF the recipient received.

#Roadmap

This is our first version. What’s next on the list:

• A widget / block library that users can extend — sections are hard-coded today; we want users to be able to build their own widgets that meet their specific needs.
• Cross-campaign reports — reports are per-job today. A team-wide report (“every active search, rolled up”) is the logical next step.
• Dashboards alongside PDFs — the same data and widgets, but as an in-app dashboard you can share via a link, without generating a file.
• Direct Excel / CSV export — for the customers who do want to pivot it themselves.
• Power BI / Qlik / etc. — more integrations with external tools so you can plug the data into your existing reporting.

#How to get it

Reporting is available as of today for every team with an active subscription — no feature flag, no barrier for team admins. Open a job, head to the Reports tab, pick a starter template (or build your own), and you’ll email the first PDF before lunch.

Want us to walk through your first reports together on a short call? Let us know. The longer-term goal is simple: nobody on your team should ever have to assemble a weekly status report by hand again.