This recruiting spreadsheet is a perfect example of a common problem that has a simpler solution than most people realize. The user is asking how to turn a growing list of form responses into monthly summaries, and the instinct to reach for complex lookup functions is understandable. But the real issue here isn't a lack of formulas, it's that the data structure itself is working against the goal.
Look at what's happening. Each row captures a single applicant's journey: name, source, contact status, and a series of yes/no answers for screening, interviews, and hiring. That's a clean, human-readable record. But when you need monthly totals, how many applicants from Indeed in January, how many screened in February, you're asking the spreadsheet to reverse-engineer the timeline from a column of dates. The user is right to wonder if they need intermediate steps. The answer is yes, but not in the way they might expect.
The most practical path forward is to stop fighting the row-based structure and start using a tool that treats each yes/no answer as a data point, not a text string. Instead of writing one long function that tries to parse "Yes" into a count for March, the smarter move is to convert those responses into binary values, 1 for yes, 0 for no, in a separate helper column. Then a simple SUMIFS or COUNTIFS formula can pull monthly totals by source and stage without nested lookups. This is not a revolutionary insight; it's a fundamental shift in how you think about the data. The spreadsheet becomes a database, and the formulas become queries.
The user's workplace wants clarity. They want to see, at a glance, whether Indeed is delivering more screened candidates than the company website. They want to know if second-interview rates are dropping in Q2. That kind of visibility doesn't require a complex system. It requires a willingness to step back from the row-level view and build a structure that answers the questions you actually need. The solution is not a better formula, it's a better design. And that design starts with treating every response as a number you can count, not a word you have to interpret.