Salesforce Recruitment Reports
Sections/text in orange will be updated ASAP to reflect new campaigns fields.
Salesforce reports are great operational reports - they help us organize and analyze our recruitment work. Because applicant data lives in SIS, we do not use Salesforce reports for high level historical or trend analysis. Analysis reports are located in Tableau.
Salesforce operational report that help you conduct recruitment answer questions like:
- How many school/org visits and external sponsored events have I completed?
- What are the upcoming campaigns in my recruiting region?
- How many students from the school I'm visiting applied last year? How many enrolled?
Report Organization
You can quickly find reports in the Recruiting App along the menu bar. Clicking on the down arrow will get you the last five reports you’ve opened. For now, Click on the word Reports instead.
After clicking on Reports you will find a menu on the left.
| Menu | Description |
|---|---|
 |
The Reports page opens onto a list of reports you’ve recently reviewed or modified. Click on All Reports to find a report that you haven’t viewed recently. You can then sort by the name of the report, the folder that it’s stored in, who created it, or creation date. A faster way to find a report may be to click on All Folders. The collection of folders you see will depend on your role in OAR. Favorite a report to easily find it in the All Favorites folder. |
To favorite a report, find it in the reports area to the right of the reports menu and click on the down arrow at the end of the report row. Select Favorite.
Note that there may be different actions in the drop-down menu in the image than you have. No worries, some actions are dependent on your role in the office.
Collaborating in Reports
Salesforce’s report and folder sharing is different from file sharing you may be used to in Google Drive or Box, so let’s take a minute to get acquainted with it. Everyone in OAR is able to create, save, and save-as reports. However, we do not “share” reports and report folders with one another. Instead, we are grouped into user groups as your position requires. Our Salesforce Administrator works behind the scenes to define user groups and the folders and reports shared with them.
To view the report folders available to you, click All Folders in your reports menu.
Let’s go through a couple collaboration examples. If you were a member of the regional recruitment team you would have access to the UGADM - Regional Reports folder. You would know that all your core team members have access to any report you save in this folder. However, if you wanted to collaborate with a counselor on a different team you would need to save-as and place the report in the UGADM - Counselors folder.
Here’s another example. A counselor on the WI/MN team has been working on a report that looks at how many of the students scanned at Wisconsin Education Fairs converted into applicants. They’ve saved the report in their personal folder while they worked on it but now they would like to share it with their team. They will do a save-as and save the report into the UGADM - WI/MN Recruitment Team folder.
Let’s look at the Save Report pop-up, as it has some important action items that impact how you collaborate.
You are required to Name your report, and there is also an optional Report Description field. It is best practice to make the report name a clear summary of what the report is and to provide a report description that includes the report type and primary filters. Essentially, you want to know what the report contains by looking at the report name and description. Several examples are in the table below.
| Report Name | Report Description |
|---|---|
| West Coast External Events Spring 2025 | CA, NV, CO, AZ, HI, UT |
| WEF Fairs with Contacts & Opps | 2022-2024 Fall WEF fairs with contacts and 2025 opportunities |
| Fa25 SoHE Admitted Design | Students admitted to Textile and Fashion Design; Design, Innovations, and Society; and Interior Architecture |
| All External Campaigns: Aug24-May25 | A report of campaign types: College Fair, Educational Session, Organization Visit, Speaker Series August 1, 2024-May 31, 2025 |
The Report Unique Name field will be automatically filled in after you’ve named your report and clicked into another field, or clicked save.
When saving a report you are also prompted to specify which folder it is saved in. You will not be able to create a new folder but may choose between folders that you have access to. Please note that when saving a new report, the folder defaults to your Private Reports folder. When doing a save-as, the folder defaults to whichever folder the original copy is saved in.
To choose a different folder click the Select Folder button outlined in the previous image. The Select Folder window will open. You may click on any of the folders that you have access to. In the image below you’ll note that I’m doing a save-as on a report that is currently stored in the UGADM-Counselors folder. Perhaps you want to save your copy to your Personal Reports folder. I’ve outlined the All Folders link as this is what you need to push in order to see your Personal Reports folder.
If you’ve interacted with different areas of Salesforce you’re no doubt familiar with Chatter. Chatter is Salesforce’s communication tool. Awesome news: reports also have the Chatter widget! Have you written a report and want to ensure your supervisor sees it? Are you having trouble writing a report and want to ask a colleague to review? Clicking on the little bubble icon at the top right of your report screen will open Chatter. Be sure to use the Post portion of the widget and @ the person you want to collaborate with. Importantly, be sure that your collaborator has access to the folder that the report is saved in.
Report Writing 101
Filtering Report Data
Reports pull data from one of more Salesforce objects. Prior to beginning a report it’s important to determine in which object(s) your desired data is stored. To do this, we always start with this question: What do I want to know? Once you have clearly defined what you want to know, think about where you can find this information in Salesforce. Remember that Salesforce has Account, Contact, Opportunity, and Campaign objects, among others. You will choose a report type that brings in data from the object(s) that house your desired information.
Once you have a solid idea of what information you’d like in your report, including fields and which Salesforce object(s) they reside in, Open the Create New Report function within Salesforce Reports.
The menu on the left lists report categories. If the details pane is not already open, click the down arrow to the right of a report and click Details.
Report details will tell you what reports you’ve encountered using this report type and will also tell you which objects are included in the report. If you’d like even more detail, click into the fields tab to find every field available within the report type.
Here are some examples of common report types that we use.
| Report Type with Object(s) | Examples of Information That Can Be Obtained |
|---|---|
| Contacts with Opportunities |
|
| Campaigns with Related Account |
|
| Campaigns with Related Account and Recruiting Categories |
|
| Campaigns with Contacts with Opportunities |
|
Once you’ve found the report type you’d like to use, click Start Report to open Salesforce’s Report Builder.
Let’s go through an example to illustrate the steps we take to choose a report type. Pretend for a moment that it’s August 15. Recruitment in your territory generally starts mid-late September, after school has been in session for several weeks. However, you know that most of your fair invitations came in prior to the end of school in June. You’re just back from summer vacation yourself and starting to chart out your school visit travel and want to align it with the fairs in your region, so you’d like a report that will show you all fairs within your defined geographic territory, including fair location, city, and state. As well, your post-vacation memory is fuzzy - did you finish RSVPing to all fair invitations? You’d like to include fair status as well.
Turning to Salesforce, you know that fair information is stored in external event campaigns. Pulling up a sample campaign you notice that the address information is not stored in the campaign itself but in the related account (ah yes, you remember that whenever you create a campaign, it must be associated with an account, usually a school). So, your report needs both campaign and account information, and specifically information about the accounts related to each campaign. Hmmm, campaign with related account information kind of sounds familiar. You navigate to reports, click new report, and navigate to campaign type reports. Sure enough, we have a custom report type called Campaigns with Related Account.
Let’s summarize our thought process in arriving at our report type.
| What Do I Want to Know? | Where is the Data Stored? | Report Type with Object(s) |
|---|---|---|
| All fairs within my defined geographic territory, including fair address, city, and state. I’d like to include fair status as well. | Campaigns and Accounts, specifically accounts related to my campaigns |
Campaigns with Related Accounts |
Now that we’ve started our new report let’s take a tour of Salesforce’s Report Builder. Let’s start on the left of the image below. Report Builder has two tabs - Outline and Filters. We start on the Outline tab, where we can define the fields (columns) we want to see in our line data and group it by one or more data fields (group rows). To add columns or groups you can either start typing in the “Add column” or “Add group” box, or open the fields pane on the far left. The Fields pane will give you every single field available. We’ll come back to the Outline area as we build our report.
The middle-left pane of the Report Builder will contain the first several rows of your data, which will update automatically as you write with the first several rows of data if you click the Update Preview Automatically button on the right. Also on the right are your controls for saving and running the report.
Note: for large data sets you may consider turning the Update Preview Automatically button off, as it can slow down the report builder. Most of the reports we build, however, are on the smaller side so the preview button should work.
Speaking of saving, since we’re going to be customizing our report we want to be sure to save it. Go ahead and hit save on the right and don’t forget to fill in Report Name, Report Description, and determine which folder you will save the report in.
Formatting Reports
Once we have our report named and saved, let’s pop back over to the right and click on the Filters tab. You’ll see that there are two filters built into the Campaigns with Related Account report. We cannot delete these filters, but we can change them, and change them we will.
We’ll change the Show Me filter to All Active Campaigns and the Created Date to All Time. Click on the filter to access the Edit Filter box, make your new choice in the drop down menu, and click Apply.
Here is an image with both filters updated.
All active campaigns and All Time is a lot of data. Let’s stay in the filters area and add several that will help us narrow our date range. Returning to our example, it’s the start of the fall recruitment season and we want to know about fairs in our recruiting area. Let’s define fall as August 1 - December 31.
We define our time period by Start Date.. In contrast to the Created Date, which is the date the campaign was created in Salesforce, the Start Date is the day the campaign starts. Because most of our campaigns are single day events, and because we do not use the End Date field in campaigns, Start Date = Event Date. This is an important point because we must filter our report by Start Date twice to establish our August 1 - December 31 date range. This fact makes much more sense if you think of the Start Date as the Event Date. It may also help to review date fields within a campaign. The screenshot below circles the Start Date and (blank) End Date in the campaign summary at the top; the Created Date in the Created By field; and the Start Date in the Event Day and Time area. These are the data fields available in our Campaigns report.
To capture all campaigns that occur August 1 - December 31 we will create one Start Date filter that is greater or equal to August 1 and a second Start Date filter than is less than or equal to December 31. If you prefer, you can choose to set start dates as greater than July 31 and less than January 1; your choice. In Report Builder, type in start to the filter search box and select Start Date from the drop down.
A Filter By window will pop up where you’ll be able to define your operator and your date. Our date range begins with August 1 so let's chose the “greater than” operator and July 31 date. You could also choose “equal to or greater than” operator and August 1 date, whichever you prefer. Don’t forget to click Apply.
Next we’re going to define the end range of our report data. Because we want to see all data through December 31, we'll create a second Start Date filter and set the operator to less than January 1 (or less or equal to Dec 31).
We need two more filters to narrow our data by campaign type and location. For this example let’s use:
Campaign Type: College Fair
Location: Illinois
Search and find Type in the Add Filter box. Your operator is going to be equals and your value will be College Fair. Note that as you’re building your own report you may decide that you also want Speaker Series, Parent Night, or other campaign types included as well. That’s cool, the filter is built so that you can choose more than one item in the drop down.
The location filter is a little more complicated. We know we want to find a state field because we want to filter out everything that isn’t in Illinois. When we type state into the “Add Filter” box we get four choices. Whenever you have choices in Report Builder you always want to return to the object that you’re querying data from to see what exactly your desired data label is. If we open a Campaign we see that the account address is within the related account. Thus, we want the Related Account: Shipping State/Province.
We’re going to set the operator to equals and choose Illinois from the value list, then click apply.
Hooray! We’ve now filtered our data by date, location, and type of campaign!
Report Templates
Now that we have our filters set, we need to format our report so that it shows us what we want to know about each campaign. We do this by building columns in the Outline section of the Report Builder.
Returning to our example, we wanted to know about where each fair was located within the state of Illinois, and we wanted to know the status of the fair. We also wanted to align our other travel with the fairs so we need to know the date they are occurring. So, to start, let’s add these columns:
- Campaign Name
- Start Date
- Status
- Related Account: Account Name
- Related Account: Shipping Address
- Related Account: Shipping City
After filtering, adding the columns is easy peasy - all you need to do is find the data field. Remember that you can either type a portion of your column name into the Add Column search box, or open the Fields pane to drag and drop fields into your columns area.
After adding the above columns your Report Builder will look like the image below. The image has the Update Preview Automatically feature toggled on so we also see the first several rows of report data in the preview pane. A reminder that the preview pane can be useful to double check your columns, but if you're running a large data set we recommend toggling it off as it can slow the report building process.
The above screenshot emphasizes the Save & Run button. There is no auto-save in Salesforce Reports. You may choose to click just the Run button if you'd like to see a draft of the report. However, your report will not be saved. You must click the Save & Run or the Save button for your report to be saved. We emphasize this point because running the report will result in great data that you may get excited about and forget that you haven't saved. It has happened to all of us. If you navigate to a different Salesforce object after running (but not saving) a report you will lose all your hard work. Do yourself a favor and save often.
Let's click the Save & Run button on the report above. This closes report builder and takes you to the report results.
We’ve highlighted the summary bar and the top and the fact that it tallies the total number of campaigns in your report - in this case 100 even. We’ve also pointed out that both the Campaign Name and the Account Name are hyperlinked. This allows you easy drill-down access to information in the campaign as well as the related account. Finally, you can click Edit to return to the Report Builder.
In our original report scenario, we wanted to know status so that we could see if there were any that we hadn’t RSVPed to. With 100 campaigns it will take a while to scroll through and check each row. Thankfully, we can easily group the report by the status row. We can do this either within the report or within the Report Builder.
To sort by Status in the report, click the down arrow next to status and select Group Rows by This Field.
Your report will now have the status field on the far left, with the rows organized by Status.
If you’d like to get an even faster view of status, click the Add Chart button in the upper right report tool bar. This will provide a bar chart summary of campaign status, with the row data displayed below.
We know that building reports can be tricky. You are always welcome to reach out to our Salesforce Administrator or Recruitment Processes & Reporting liaison (see Salesforce Responsibilities Chart) for assistance.
If creating a report from scratch sounds a little daunting, I have good news. While it is always a good idea to document what you want to know prior to digging into a report, most of the time you will not need to start from a blank report. Instead, we recommend that you use a report template. That’s right, we’ve created report templates that will allow you to track your work after just a little customization!
Here is a summary of the templates available
| Template Name | Folder | Template Description |
|---|---|---|
| Master Trip Details Report - TEMPLATE | UGADM - Internal Adm Counselor Reports | Provides visit details for each master trip. This is a template - users should Save As 'My Master Trips' and choose their private folder |
| HS Counselor Contacts Template | UGADM - Counselors | Contacts with Affiliations Report. Save-as and customize using Organization Shipping Address and/or Organization SubCode filters |
| Individual Recruitment Report | UGADM - Counselors | Individual Report using relative value $USER. Campaigns with Related Account, pulling in State, County, and EPS data. Customize date using the two Start Date filters |
| HS Visits with Contacts & Opps | UGADM - Counselors | Individual Report using relative value $USER. HS visits with ALL contacts and ALL opportunities for the cycle |
| All External Campaigns | UGADM - Counselors | A report of all campaign types: College Fair, Educational Session, Organization Visit, Speaker Series with a defined start and end date |
| Last School Attended Contacts - Template | UGADM - Counselors | Contacts with Opportunities. Customize by Term and LSA: Account Shipping Address |
Note that each template description indicates fields for you to customize.