A simple spreadsheet to track every application and what happened
Okay you guys. Last lesson was filling in the cover letter template for your real job. So by now you should have a résumé you trust and a short cover letter you can turn around in twenty minutes. Today's lesson isn't glamorous but it's the one that saves you from doing everything else in this course by feel and guesswork. We're building a tracking spreadsheet.
Here's why I care about this so much. I keep a spreadsheet of every job I've applied to and what happened with it. I also photograph the confirmation screens when I submit an application, the same way I photograph my canned tomatoes when I'm done for the season. It's the same habit both times. You document it, and then you actually know what worked instead of guessing. Without the spreadsheet you're just left with a feeling — "I feel like I've applied to a lot of places" — and feelings are not data.
What you actually need
You don't need anything fancy. A free Google Sheet or an Excel file is plenty. Six columns, that's it:
- Date applied
- Company and job title
- Where you found it (job board, company site, someone told you about it)
- Résumé version used — this matters, I'll explain in a second
- Status (applied, phone screen, interview, offer, rejected, ghosted — pick your own words, just be consistent)
- Notes — anything worth remembering, like who you talked to or what they emphasized in the posting
That's the whole spreadsheet. Don't let anyone talk you into adding fifteen more columns. You will not fill them in, and an unused column is just guilt sitting on your screen.
Why "résumé version used" is the column people skip and shouldn't
You already know from earlier in this course that I'd rather you send five tailored résumés than fifty generic ones. If you're tailoring — which you should be — you're going to end up with multiple versions of your résumé. Maybe one leans on your customer service experience, one leans on your scheduling and organizing. If you don't track which version went where, and you get a callback three weeks later, you won't remember what that company already saw. You'll walk into an interview not knowing your own résumé. That's a bad way to start a conversation.
Name your files clearly — we covered that a couple lessons back — and just type the filename into that column. Takes ten seconds.
Fill it in every single time, right when you apply
Not at the end of the week. Not "I'll remember which ones I did." You won't. Open the application, submit it, immediately switch tabs and add the row. It's a thirty-second habit that turns into your whole memory of the job search once you're six weeks in and it all starts blurring together.
This is also where I'll say the blunt thing: if you're not willing to spend thirty seconds tracking an application, I'd ask whether you actually did the work to tailor it, or whether you just fired off the generic version because it was faster. The spreadsheet has a way of showing you the truth about your own effort.
What the spreadsheet is actually for
It's not just record-keeping for its own sake. After two or three weeks you can look at that Status column and start seeing patterns. Maybe every job you found through one particular job board is going nowhere and every one from a company's own website gets a response. Maybe your "customer service" résumé version is getting callbacks and your "general" version isn't. That's useful. That tells you where to spend your time next week instead of blasting applications out evenly across everything.
I think about this the same way I think about Sadie's résumé when she was twenty. Her first draft said "hard worker" and "team player" and nothing else — nothing a stranger could check. I made her rewrite every line into something measurable, something she'd actually done. She was annoyed about it for a full day. Then she started getting callbacks. The spreadsheet works the same way underneath it. It turns "I feel like I'm doing a lot" into something you can actually check and measure, the same way "team player" turned into "trained four new hires in her first three months." Vague feelings don't get you hired and they don't help you improve. Specifics do.
A couple of practical notes
- If you're applying through a company portal that makes you create an account for every single job — and a lot of them do, it's obnoxious — write your login info down somewhere too. I keep mine in a note attached to the spreadsheet. Losing track of fifteen different portal passwords is a genuinely dumb way to lose a week.
- Don't let the spreadsheet make you feel bad. A long list of "rejected" and "no response" isn't a referendum on you. It's information. Some of it is timing, some of it is the market, some of it is a hundred other applicants for one spot. The spreadsheet's job is to show you patterns, not to hand you a scorecard on your worth.
Before next time
Set up your spreadsheet this week, even if you haven't sent a single application yet. Get the habit built before you need it, so when things start moving you're not scrambling to remember what you already sent.