Keeping track of job applications
The first ten applications need no system. You remember the company, you remember the role, you remember roughly what you sent. Somewhere after that, the memory quietly stops working. A number you do not recognise calls on a Tuesday afternoon, says the name of a company, and asks whether you have a few minutes to talk about the role — and you have no idea which role that is, or what you wrote in the cover letter, or whether the posting mentioned a salary.
That phone call is the whole reason to keep a list. Not discipline, not productivity: being able to answer in the ten seconds before it becomes awkward.
The seven things worth writing down
Most tracking systems die of too many columns. These seven are the ones you will actually reach for later.
- Company. The name you would say out loud, not the legal entity on the contract.
- Role. The exact title from the posting. Two openings at the same company can differ by one word, and that word is the one the recruiter will use.
- A copy of the posting. Not just the link — the text. More on this below.
- The date you applied. One date, the day it left your hands.
- Which resume you sent. If you keep more than one version, the version number or file name. When they ask about something on it, you want to be looking at the same page they are.
- Where it came from. The job board, the company site, a person who forwarded it. This is the only field that tells you, three months later, which channels are worth your time.
- What happens next, and when. One line. “Follow up on 6 October.” “Interview Thursday 10:00.” If this field is empty, the application is not really live.
That is the whole list. Salary, location and work arrangement are worth having when the posting states them, but they change nothing about what you do next — they help you decide whether to apply at all, and after that they are reference.
Copy the posting, not just the link
Postings come down. They come down when the role is filled, when the requisition is frozen, when the job board rotates its stock — often within a few weeks, and almost always before your interview. A link to a deleted posting is worth nothing, and it goes exactly when you need it: the night before you talk to someone about the job.
So keep the text. Paste it somewhere, whole, ugly formatting and all. Before an interview you will want the original words, because the questions come from them: the responsibilities in the order they listed them, the tools they named, the phrase they used for the team. Preparing against a summary you wrote from memory is preparing for a different job.
Four statuses that stay honest
It is tempting to invent ten stages — researching, drafting, submitted, acknowledged, screening, phone screen — and then to spend the search maintaining a taxonomy instead of applying. Four hold up:
- Saved — interested, not sent.
- Applied — sent, waiting.
- In progress — a human has replied, and something is scheduled or expected.
- Closed — rejected, withdrawn, or gone quiet past the point of pretending.
The fourth one is the useful one, and the hardest to use. An application with no reply after four or five weeks is closed. Leaving it as Applied costs nothing technically and quite a lot in practice: the list starts looking like twenty live conversations when there are three, and a list that flatters you is a list you stop trusting.
Closing something is not giving up on it. If they write back in November, you reopen it in ten seconds.
The weekly review
Fifteen minutes, same time each week. Three passes:
- Anything waiting on you? Every row whose next step has a date in the past. Do it, or change the date to a real one.
- Anything gone quiet? Applied more than four weeks ago with no reply — close it.
- Anything to send? Applied last week with no acknowledgement — one follow-up, short, to the person who posted it if you know who that is.
One follow-up is right. A second, a week after the first, is tolerated. A third is not persistence but noise, and the person receiving it is usually not the person deciding.
After the review, the list is true again. That is the entire point: a list nobody trusts gets replaced by memory, and memory is what failed in the first place.
Where to keep it
A notes app works for a handful of applications and stops working the moment you want to ask “which of these is waiting on me?” — you cannot sort prose.
A spreadsheet is the honest default. It sorts, it filters, it is free, and you already know how to use it. Two failure modes: columns drift (you add priority, then excitement, then notes 2, and each one is another thing to fill in), and there is nowhere comfortable to paste a two-thousand-word posting — so people paste a link instead, and the link dies.
A dedicated tool saves the typing and keeps the posting text where it belongs, which is the one thing a spreadsheet is bad at. The thing to check before you adopt one: whether your notes are exportable, and where the data actually lives. You are putting your employment history, your salary expectations and a list of everyone who rejected you into it.
Whichever you pick, the system only has to survive one thing — the Tuesday phone call. If you can say “yes, the platform engineering role, I applied on the twelfth” before the pause gets long, it is working.
Everything here works on paper. If you would rather not keep the paper,the app does this bit — paste a posting and it fills in the details, and it all stays on your own computer.