Purpose

This article introduces the Eightfold’s Native Dashboard, the in-product experience for building custom analytics dashboards without depending on external BI tools. It explains the three core building blocks (dashboards, widgets, datasets) and how they fit together, then walks through the end-to-end flow at a high level, so a reader can orient themselves before diving into the detailed how-to articles.

Audience

• BI Analyst — builds and maintains dashboards, works most directly with datasets and custom widgets.
  
• TA Leader — primary consumer of TA dashboards; may request or lightly configure views for their team.
  
• Admin — needs authoring privileges to create dashboards and manages who can access them.

Configuration

Every dashboard in the native authoring experience is built from the same three nesting pieces: a dashboard holds widgets, and every widget is powered by a dataset.

• Dashboard: the container — on its own, nothing but an organised collection of widgets, arranged into tabs and sections so the story flows logically.

• Widget: the basic building block that actually shows data — a single number, trend line, pie chart, or table, each answering one question. Widgets can be pulled ready-made from the widget library, or built from scratch using SQL.
  
• Dataset: what powers a widget — a predefined SQL view sitting between the raw data and the widget. A widget can use an existing governed dataset, or a brand-new custom dataset can be created on the fly.

The end-to-end flow

1. Access Insights — navigate to the Insights tab from the top navigation bar within the Talent Acquisition product, the landing page for all dashboards available to the org.
   
2. Start a dashboard — click Create new dashboard and choose to start from a blank canvas, or clone a pre-configured template seeded with widgets, sections, and filters for common use cases.
   
3. Name it and set up tabs — give the dashboard a name and description (both required to save), and add tabs to split it into logically distinct views.
   
4. Add widgets — pull ready-made widgets from the library via search and drag-and-drop, or create a custom widget from scratch using SQL against a chosen dataset (identity, dataset, measure, filters, date/time anchor, visualization type, data mapping, display toggles, drill-downs).
   
5. Configure dashboard-level filters — expose filters (e.g. date range, business unit, department) that propagate to any widget whose dataset supports that column, giving viewers self-serve re-slicing.
   
6. Organize with sections — group widgets into named sections within a tab to give the dashboard narrative structure.
   
7. Save — pass name/uniqueness validation, choose a Dashboard Category (Talent Acquisition, Career Site, Talent Management, or Custom Dashboards) which determines where it surfaces, and optionally share with users or groups.
   
8. Find it on Insights — the saved dashboard appears as a card under its category, with Open/Edit/Delete actions available from the kebab menu.