Your Last Twenty Applications, Written Down Honestly

Ask someone how their search is going and you will hear a feeling: “terrible”, “quiet”, “nothing is working”.

Ask how many of their last twenty applications got any reply at all and most people cannot say. That is not carelessness. Nobody sets out to keep a record of something painful. But you cannot diagnose a process you have not written down, and the writing down takes about an hour.

The seven columns

One row per application, last twenty, most recent first:

1. Date applied
2. Company and role
3. Where you found it — board, channel, referral, careers page
4. Were you eligible? Honestly. Location, authorisation, overlap.
5. Did you tailor it? Yes or no. Not “sort of”.
6. Any reply? Rejection counts. Silence is its own answer.
7. How far it went — nothing, screen, interview, final, offer

That is the ledger. It is not a productivity system and it does not need an app.

Now count four things

The eligible number. Of twenty, how many could that company legally have hired? Most people find five or six, which means their reply rate has been calculated against the wrong denominator for months and the picture they had of themselves was arithmetically wrong.

The tailored number. Of the eligible ones, how many were actually aligned to the advert?

The human-response rate. Replies divided by eligible applications. Rejections count — they prove you reached a decision layer. Silence usually means you were never read.

The furthest point. Where does the process consistently end?

What each pattern means

Few eligible roles in the list, and your problem is supply or aim — you are not seeing or not selecting roles that could hire you.

Plenty eligible, tailored, and near-total silence: that is representation. You were not read.

Replies and rejections but no interviews: aim again, at a finer grain — you are reaching the right companies at the wrong level or the wrong function.

Interviews that end without offers: conversion, and that is genuinely good news, because the expensive parts are already working.

Why this is the highest-value hour in your search

Because every repair after it is aimed. Without the ledger you are choosing what to fix based on which article you read most recently, and the four repairs cost very different amounts of time and money.

Do the hour. Then take the four numbers into the free diagnostic — five questions, ninety seconds — and you will get a named part rather than a guess. Bring the same numbers to a conversation with us on +234 803 292 5957 and you will get a specific answer instead of a general one.