HR Status Report

About this template

Fourteen slides for a 15-minute report

The deck is a cover, an agenda, four section-divider-plus-body pairs (eight slides), a year-on-year comparison, a four-card metrics slide, a trend slide and a closing slide. That length fits a quarterly or annual HR review for the leadership team – headcount, hiring, attrition and training in one pass. Anything that names individuals, such as postings or appraisal outcomes, is safer in a separate document.

All seven agenda lines have a slide

The agenda on slide 2 reads headcount, recruitment, attrition and retention, training, last year versus this year, key figures, trend analysis – and every one of the seven lines has a screen behind it. The first four are the four divider-and-body pairs on slides 3-10, the fifth is the two-column comparison on slide 11, the sixth is the cards on slide 12, the seventh the bars on slide 13. So the agenda rarely needs work: only when you add a subject the file does not carry, such as compensation or culture, do you duplicate the 9-10 pair, add a line and renumber the SECTION labels. When you remove a topic, delete divider and body as a pair for the same reason.

Work backwards from the numbers

1. Fix the four cards on slide 12 first: 315 employees, 9.8% attrition, 37 days to hire, 42 training hours per person. Those four numbers are effectively your conclusion.
2. The four bars on slide 13 are labelled January 11, April 25, July 34, October 48. The final value matches the 48 experienced hires on the recruitment slide, so it reads as cumulative hiring – label the unit accordingly.
3. Write the four body slides (4, 6, 8, 10). Each is one framing line plus three items.
4. Replace the six values on slide 11 with figures from the HR system: 2025 on the left, 2026 on the right, three rows – approved and filled positions, voluntary attrition, average tenure.
5. Finish with the cover line and the closing message.

Values already in the body slides

• Headcount: 284 permanent and 31 contract staff, average tenure 4 years 7 months, 27% women in management. 284 + 31 = 315, which matches the metrics card, so change all three together.
• Recruitment: 48 experienced hires, 37 days average time to hire, 4 accepted offers declined.
• Attrition: 9.8% voluntary attrition, 6 leavers within the first year, 94% retention of key talent. State the denominator for the rate.
• Training: 42 hours per person a year, 26 job courses opened, 38 leadership course completions.
• Slide 11: 2025 with 300 approved positions and 278 filled, 14.2% voluntary attrition, 3.9 years average tenure; 2026 with 340 and 315, 9.8%, 4.6 years. The 315 and the 9.8% are the same numbers as on the cards.

How the slide count works

In this structure the number of body sections = (total slides – 6) / 2. Six slides are fixed – cover, agenda, comparison, metrics, trend, closing – and the rest split into divider-plus-body pairs. Fourteen slides means four sections; adding one section takes you to sixteen. You can drop the dividers to shorten the deck, but then nothing signals a topic change, so keep them for anything over half an hour.

Where the report stalls

• Leaving the sample figures on slide 11 (300 approved and 278 filled for 2025, 340 and 315 for 2026). Those are the first numbers anyone in the room checks against the HR system.
• Editing the body slides and the cards separately; 315, 9.8%, 37 days and 42 hours each appear in both places.
• Changing the trend numbers but not the unit label; once people, percent and currency are mixed, questions turn into number checks. The bars are shapes, so heights do not follow edited values.
• Reporting 9.8% attrition as a single company-wide figure instead of splitting it by job family, which is what the follow-up question asks for anyway.