What is a job applications tracker?

A job applications tracker is a useful tool that helps you organize your job application activities. In its best form, the tracker documents the statuses of all your applications across the hiring process. A job application tracker could be a simple spreadsheet, a project management tool, or even a handwritten version. Using the tracker, you record all your job search activities. These range from preparing your application documents through to interviews. Most importantly, you should start tracking the actual job applications. Doing so will help you understand the performance of your applications.

Benefits of job application tracking

In today’s job market, it’s not uncommon to submit applications for many positions. That involves lots of time and effort. On average, job candidates send out anywhere between few tens to few hundreds of applications. Usually, it’s a lot to job applications keep track of. With so many applications out there, it’s only natural to get a little confused. But, imaging the worst-case scenario. You get a call about a position you can’t exactly remember. So, you panic, and then, you ask:

Which job is this for?

You don’t want to squander your applications by:

• missing important deadlines
• garbling companies and positions
• confusing interviews, or worse
• forgetting to follow up

Hence, organizing and managing your job search is just as important as identifying job opportunities and submitting your application.

Tracking with INTRVU Xpose™ tool

At INTRVU, we developed the Xpose™ tracking tool to help our clients professionally track their job applications. Xpose is a Microsoft Excel-based tool that provides real-time insights on the application performance. These insights help understand the application process bottlenecks in an objective manner. We developed this product over the course of several years based on our own personal experiences as job seekers and from our client engagements.

Tracking your job applications in a disciplined manner is not exciting, but rather, a cumbersome process. However, diligence in this activity enhances:

• the quality of job applications
• the overall application throughput, and
• conversions

If you start to feel downhearted by your lack of progress, your job application tracking system could provide positive evidence of your efforts and motivate you. You can also use it to identify trends and patterns to improve your job search skills. For example do you have more success with a particular version of your CV. In addition, it can also help you remember to thank your contacts that referred you.

A professional tool as Xpose makes this process easier by removing guesswork out of the job search process. Furthermore, Xpose™ includes several best-practices that are embedded in the tool.

What information should you track?

When tracking your job applications, make sure that you maintain the following information:

• Name of the company
• Name of the hiring manager/recruiter, if available
• Contact information
• Job title
• Salary information, if disclosed
• Job posting channel i.e. where the job was posted (e.g LinkedIn, company website, etc.)
• Job IDs on job listings. For many companies, this is likely the easiest way to find the open position in their system
• Link to the job position
• Application documents you submitted
• Location of the job
• Date of the job posting
• Date of your application
• Status of your application
• Interview dates, if any
• Rejection date
• Offers received, if any

Additionally, you should record any supporting documents or materials you shared as part of the application package, such as references / portfolios, etc.

Finally, it is often helpful to actually save the entire job description; you’ll want to have it to refer to if you get an interview, and sometimes, by that point, the original posting has already been removed.