Threw myself at random job applications vs using a spreadsheet to track my search and the difference was night and day

For like two months I was just firing off resumes to anything that looked half decent on Indeed, couldn't tell you who I applied to or when. Then my buddy who's a recruiter told me I was being an idiot and showed me his tracking method. I made a simple Google sheet with columns for company name, date applied, job title, contact person, and follow up status. Turns out I had applied to the same company three times in two weeks because their different listings went to different departments. Once I started tracking, I noticed I was spending way too much time on jobs that had been posted for over 30 days. The spreadsheet helped me focus on fresh listings and actually prepping for interviews instead of scrambling when someone called. Anybody else ever wasted time applying blind like I did or do you all use some system already?

2 comments

2 Comments

grace_wright19d ago

oh man, my friend jenna literally did the exact same thing. she was applying for like marketing jobs and ended up interviewing for a position she didn't even remember applying for. turns out she applied to a company's "social media coordinator" role and then a week later applied to their "digital marketing assistant" role which was basically the same job with a different title. the interviewer was like "so we see you applied twice through our system" and she just wanted to crawl under the table. she started using a simple notebook after that, just wrote down the company name and the date and what version of the job posting she used for her cover letter. said it saved her from looking completely unorganized.

stellaa6919d ago

Notebooks never fail. Simple but smart.