The One Spreadsheet That Changes How You Job Hunt

Ask someone how their job search is going and you get a feeling: "badly", "slow", "I've applied everywhere".

Ask how many applications went out last week and to what kind of company, and how many reached a human, and the answer is usually a pause.

That pause is the whole problem. You cannot fix a process you are not measuring, and a job search that is not written down is not a process — it is a mood.

Nine columns

A sheet in Google Sheets, or a Notion table if you prefer. It takes about fifteen minutes to build.

• Date applied — so you know when to follow up
• Company and role
• Source — job board, company careers page, referral, direct outreach
• CV version — which tailored version you sent
• Contact — the human you found, if you found one
• Follow-up sent — the dates, so you neither forget nor over-chase
• Status — applied, replied, screening, interview, offer, rejected, silent
• Notes — anything specific they asked, and how you answered

What it tells you after three weeks

This is the part worth having. After twenty or thirty rows, the sheet stops being admin and starts being a diagnosis.

Applications going out but no replies at all? Your representation is the leak — the CV, the LinkedIn, the way you are described on paper. Not your skill and not the market.

Replies, but they die at the screening call? Something in how you talk about your experience is not landing. That is a rehearsal problem, and it is fixable in an afternoon.

Interviews that go well and end in nothing? Usually the final third — no clear plan for the role, no questions asked, no follow-through.

Everything working, but only three applications in a fortnight? You do not have a conversion problem. You have a volume problem, and it is the easiest of the four to fix.

Without the sheet, all four of these feel identical from the inside. They feel like "it is not working".

The second thing it does

It shows you which sources convert. Almost everyone discovers the same pattern: the applications that reached a named human — through a referral, a careers page, a direct message — convert several times better than the ones fired into a job-board portal.

You will not believe that until you see it in your own numbers, in your own handwriting. Then you will change how you spend your evenings.

One habit that keeps it alive

Fill the row at the moment you apply, not later. A tracker updated from memory on Sunday night is fiction, and fiction cannot diagnose anything.

If you would rather not run the tracker, the sourcing, and the applications yourself at all — that is exactly what the seven-day done-for-you hunt does on your behalf. See how it works →