“I was thinking of using a spreadsheet to record the date I applied, if there was a cut-off date for unsuccessful applicants, and the company I applied with. Is this excessive or is this how everyone tracks jobs?” A reader asked Alison Green that in 2019, tucked in as the fifth of five unrelated questions bundled into one Ask a Manager post. Green’s answer ran two sentences: not excessive at all, and plenty of people find it useful to see where they’ve applied and for how long. Underneath that answer, eight hundred and twenty-two comments piled up on the post, and an improbable number of them were strangers volunteering the exact tracking system they use, unprompted, like confessing to something they’d each assumed was a personal quirk.
I went looking for that letter expecting one useful example. I got a comment section that reads like a support group for people who got tired of forgetting things.
No two systems in the comments matched
One commenter, going by “Hopeful,” described a color-coded spreadsheet: position and company in one column, where she’d found the listing in another, the closing date if there was one, the date she applied, a link to the posting, and cell shading that moved from light orange (not started) to light yellow (in process) to green (submitted). Another, “Bookworm1858,” built a Google Form instead, because she was a new grad applying across industries she didn’t yet know well enough to sort by hand. “Colette” made a folder per company, with a subfolder per role if she’d applied to more than one opening at the same place, each holding the résumé and cover letter version she’d sent and a saved copy of the posting itself, so she could pull it up fast the moment a call came in about a specific role. “S,” a career-services counselor, had built a shared template for the students she advised, specifically so she could catch the ones who were reapplying to the same company twice without noticing, or reaching out cold to a recruiter without an actual application behind it. None of these people were talking to each other, and none of them landed on the same format. Four questions above theirs, in the same post, is someone asking how to stop a coworker from repeatedly falling down as a workplace prank — a detail I mention only because it’s a genuinely strange thing to find one scroll away from a thread this earnest, and because it’s a reminder that most of what gets asked in public, even anonymously, is more mundane than dramatic.
None of them agreed on a format.
“Matilda Jefferies” put the actual point better than I can: “You probably need to have some kind of system for tracking your job applications, but it doesn’t have to be any particular kind of system. Whatever works for you, do that!” It’s the one piece of advice in the whole thread nobody argued with.
Ask a ManagerPranking coworkers, and more (question 5)The letter and its comment section — read past Alison’s two-sentence answer for the dozens of real systems readers described underneath it.Only one side of the process is running on memory
Every application you send lands in whatever applicant tracking system that employer runs — a database with your résumé parsed into fields, a status column, a timestamp on every stage change, notes attached to your name that outlive the person who wrote them. Nobody on the hiring side is trying to hold your application in their head. The market has also gotten louder on the candidate’s side of that same exchange: Greenhouse’s 2024 State of Job Hunting report, built from its own platform data plus a survey of 2,500 workers, found that 38 percent of job seekers were mass-applying to roles rather than pursuing anything targeted, and 79 percent described the current market as a source of heightened anxiety. Both numbers describe the same shift — more applications moving through more inboxes, with less attention paid to each one — and that’s exactly the condition under which a person relying on memory alone starts losing track.
Greenhouse2024 State of Job Hunting ReportSurvey data from 2,500 workers plus the company’s own platform numbers — the anxiety and mass-application figures are what matter here, not the ghosting stats everyone already cites.“Turquoisecow,” another commenter on that same thread, gave the plainest reason of anyone for starting her spreadsheet: she kept seeing the same postings resurface on job boards and lost track of which ones she’d already applied to. That isn’t a hypothetical. It’s what happens when the volume on one side of a transaction outpaces plain human memory on the other, and it happens to people who are otherwise entirely competent at their jobs.
Weak ties only help the people who remember they exist
The clearest evidence that a job search rewards a system over memory doesn’t come from Ask a Manager at all. It comes from Mark Granovetter’s 1973 study of how people in Newton, Massachusetts actually found their jobs, and from the randomized LinkedIn experiment nearly fifty years later that confirmed it at a scale of twenty million people: the contacts who help most are the ones you see only occasionally, not your closest friends and not total strangers, because they’re the ones marinating in information you don’t already have.
Mark Granovetter (1973), summarized at AcaWikiThe Strength of Weak TiesThe original finding — read it for the Newton numbers, which the LinkedIn experiment later confirmed with a randomized version of the same question.A contact like that is, by definition, not someone you think about often. The follow-up depends on something reminding you they exist, at the right moment, rather than on you happening to remember on your own.
A spreadsheet with a résumé column and a date column doesn’t do that by itself. It needs a place for people, not just postings — the coworker who moved to the company you’re curious about, the former manager who said to reach out if you were ever looking. Nothing about that list changes because you didn’t write it down. What changes is whether you remember it exists on the one week it would have mattered.
What a spreadsheet makes you see
Not everyone wants this made visible, and that reaction deserves more than a dismissal. One commenter on the same thread, “Owl,” said flatly that keeping a spreadsheet felt depressing, because it made a brutal ratio impossible to ignore: apply to a hundred jobs, get four interviews. That’s a real cost, not a strawman. A system doesn’t just help you plan — it hands you your own conversion rate in a single glance, and there are entirely reasonable people who are better off not looking at that number too closely while they’re still in the middle of a search that isn’t going well.
The honest answer is that the number was already true before the spreadsheet existed. Writing it down doesn’t make the search worse. It just removes the option of not knowing.
- Company, role, and the date you applied — the three fields every system in that comment thread had in common, however different the rest of their format.
- Where you found the listing, or who sent it to you, so a cold application doesn’t get mistaken for a warm one when someone finally calls.
- The posting itself, saved somewhere outside the company’s own site. Postings close, get edited, or vanish by the time a recruiter reaches out, and you’ll want to know what you actually applied to.
- A follow-up date that’s an actual date, not a feeling. “Soon” isn’t a column a spreadsheet can sort on.
None of that requires anything fancier than what “Hopeful” and “Bookworm1858” built for themselves for free, in a spreadsheet or a form, on a random afternoon in 2019. Vigil exists because most people would rather have the tracking happen automatically, off an inbox that’s already collecting every recruiter email and interview invite whether anyone organizes it or not. But the spreadsheet works too, and it was already working years before anyone was pitching a product to replace it.
Pick the ugliest version of it you’ll actually reopen next week.
That’s the entire bar, and most people never clear it.