I read a comment on here about someone applying for 50+ jobs and having an Excel sheet for it. Would the new grads and veterans be interested in something like a nice intuitive dashboard with the job application status, gmail API for the quick browsing of the emails, links related to the interviewing process, and stage the interview is in?
I've applied to probably 100+ jobs in the past two years. I tried keeping track for a while and later felt it was not helpful. Occasionally I have to dig back through emails to verify things, like whether a recruiter submitted me for a certain company, and it can be a slight pain. But I don't think I would get enough value out of a whole app dedicated to this topic to bother to download it, and I am probably an ideal user of such a thing.
Third party recruiters are the number one pain of the process. They don't respect candidates; they don't want to hear about your goals or your search constraints; they just aggressively talk over you. And I'm even talking about the so-called 'good' recruiters that you get referred to by word of mouth. Even they will break your heart.
The second pain point is well known: everyone uses different online application portals, and everyone has different requirements for manual data entry. I would have expected by now that applying at any company is as simple as just uploading a resume and clicking through some boilerplate agreements or ethnicity surveys that we would all be wise enough to always opt-out of. But I'm still dealing with application sites that look like they were built in 1995 and require upwards of 30 minutes of manual data entry.
Apps that could alleviate the pain of these issues would be way more valuable than organizational apps. The pain of the disorganization is just not that meaningful.
I just finished my job search, and I'd agree with this strongly. I started used Trello for organizing my job applications, but I soon realized there was no point. Companies that wanted to talk to me responded to my initial application with a week or two, while companies that didn't weren't influenced by any kind of followup communication.
After sending out about a hundred applications, I found I had no control over the process, so there was no reason to track it. Instead, I spent that time working on my own projects and going to meetups to find out about live job openings and show off my stuff. The job application system at most places is badly broken and HR and recruiters don't seem to know or care enough to fix it, so it's better to circumvent through some kind of personal connection.
I strongly agree with the comments about doing your own projects and going to meetups. When I began to just submit applications and then stop thinking about them, it freed up much more time to actually do programming. This in turn made me feel more productive and allowed me to learn new things, which is a big source of happiness for me. The compounding positive effects from sort of tuning out the noisy signals from HR staff and recruiters and putting energy into what I love (programming and math) has made me feel much more positive about my job search overall.
Any time I have a day where there's just nothing good to apply to, or I don't hear back from anyone, I just tune it all out and write some code and it helps me feel much better.
I can agree with this too. Recently found a job after 50+ applications. I started with heavily tracking them, but in the end I lost the care in doing it. When a potential lead called me up it was to arrange an interview and so as soon as I got their details, a quick search of the company name in my Gmail revealed what I'd actually applied for.
If you're planning on writing something like this, perhaps a tool for the flip side would be better, i.e. an applicant tracker for organisations (although these do already exist).
Ditto. I'm in the midst of my own longer-than-expected job search and was elaborately tracking until I realized that past a 1 week horizon was a waste of effort.
As someone going through a job hunt at the moment, my biggest pain point is lack of standardization in resume formatting for online job portals. My biggest pain points are:
1) No standardized resume format that all job portals parse the same.
2) Inconsistent resume parsing and form filling meaning it's faster to do things by hand than upload a resume and edit.
A great place to start would be fixing this on the Job Portal side by creating and publishing a standard resume format that all of them can parse easily. If that means dumping my resume to a standardized XML format, I'll do it. I'm tired of wasting 20-30 minutes of my life filling out forms for one job because their resume parser can't tell me what they're looking for.
Having applied for a wide variety of jobs, I've noticed most of the non-major tech companies are using standard portals like Jobvite or Taleo to handle their application process. I think it'd be possible to upend this market by advertising you make it easier for candidates to apply which increases the likelihood of the company gets more qualified candidates. With the standardized resume format, you can increase filtering on the backend to help recruiters zero in on people they want to talk to increasing chances of getting a hit and finding the right candidate. Win-Win.
I think Excel or Trello are fine for most of the people out there and the ones that need so much data won't pay for it (because I doubt somebody doing 100+ applications is a successful employee with money to spend).
I think you should focus on whatever takes out most of the effort of this process and for that an email would be the best solution: send me an email that is targeted to me and with jobs I can actually apply for.
The biggest pain for me is not doing applications, it's doing applications for jobs where I have no idea if: 1. I have good chances; 2. have been closed already (lots of those out there; 3. have the pay I am looking for.
Background story: I applied to 10+ companies a month ago. I did keep track, I did follow up etc. Couple of them didn't follow up, couple of them I remembered not replying last time I applied for them as well. Nothing changed. I was tired of Excel, Notepad, Gmail.
The pain you're describing is being handled by at least 10 companies that I know and which sent me updates about the jobs. Granted they're not the best, but they work.
The pain I wanted to reduce was the pain that comes with the entire process. When you're simultaneously in 10+ process it can become easy to lose your focus and forget to follow up, read notes, to dos (google most recent interviews etc).
The pain I also wanted to remove was the pain of re-applying to companies that are god awful at providing feedback, that do not reply, that forget to close job ads etc. Think job app history.
Another pain I wanted to remove was weighing the offers via charts and summaries on the offer page and show communication and interest from the company on the reports page.
Another idea as suggested in comments:
Provide this data transparently, blind the important information and that might take the product to a whole new level.
I do not want this to be another job board or an email newsletter. There are plenty out there.
Maybe the problem is asymmetrical information. If I interview at Apple and do fantastic, and I have interviews lined up at Google and Facebook, wouldn't it be a better use of the other interviewers' time to look up my results and focus on things that matter, like culture fit?
I think the problem is that while most of us have college degrees which at least give us a foot in the door, there is very little differentiation to an employer from a graduate of Waterloo or Carnegie Mellon. You might assume they're good but you don't know. They aren't vested by the companies you trust to have quality screening processeses.
The problem might be getting companies to willingly disclose their information. Then again, I went to a co-op school so by the time I graduated I already had nearly a year of work experience, and very little trouble with each additional notch on my belt. Maybe there is a way to solve this that isn't necessarily a product or service.
A lot of the feedback you're getting is saying that the problem you're interested in solving can already by solved by other tools or simply isn't a major problem. What features do you envision that can't already be handled by Trello?
I would consider reading the comments again, it seems like a lot more people are wanting a way to quickly fill out a variety of similar but non-standard forms than want either a job board or a job app tracker.
Oh. I didn't know this. They seem like workable, lever.
However, there is something fundamentally different - they're just an assistant and automatic job applier, converting to pdfs, creating cover letters etc. I wouldn't offer that. I'd aim this initially to only tech-savvy people like developers, engineers - you get the picture. I'm sure they don't need help with converting to pdf and formatting. They don't need help with applying. They do however need a way to track their application progress, as I have applied to a couple of companies 10+ and at times it was tedious to track all of them.
I meant something more like an actual job process tracking tool and a data tool for your own use.
You apply for a job - tracked progress - landed the job. You landed couple actually. You go to the offer page and compare the benefits at a glance via graphs, summary's etc.
Lets say you searched for a job, you've sent 30+ applications, logged the process etc. You got hired (woohoo). Something doesn't work out after 6 months or after 2,3 years you start feeling burnt out and want to move on. You look back and see where you applied, how was the process, email the recruiter etc. You see they didn't reply while you had the necessary qualifications and they didn't provide you with a great feedback. You consult google and the tool which might have public database by now that is huge - realizing they didn't change. You don't waste time.
If you consider applying for a job as little different to a sales process/funnel could you sign-up for an account with salesforce, zoho or similar and manage your opportunities that way.
I did find it difficult when I was applying for jobs. I had reasons for applying to hundreds of companies through different sources and I used google spreadsheet to keep track. I felt it was not enough when I started getting updates and keeping track of previous conversation became painful. So I put together a django application to do this. I just pushed it to github [1]
I didn't need much of features on web UI, I used default admin app.
I never thought of searching for something like this, so options suggested in comments here are new to me, and not being arrogant but if I have to do job search again then I will still use my django app because - its good enough, self hosted, can modify at any time, etc.
however, to answer your question: Yes, I do feel there is a need for no-bs-app for doing this. Not everyone is a developer, they do need ready-to-use app.
will I pay? : if I am looking for switch from current one then probably, if I don't have a job then no.
If you need any help with workflows, feedback, ux etc, would be glad to help (for free)
It's hard to envision meeting every applicant's needs with a single webapp. Excel and such may have a lack of depth to them, but at least it's easy to add any kind of data you need anywhere. Can you think of everything that any type of applicant might want, and put it all in there without also making it overwhelmingly complex to use?
The financial pressures on something like this could become awkward. Your target audience is applicants, but not many of them are going to be willing to spend money on something like that. But hiring companies are also going to be very interested in this, especially if you're doing any kind of tracking across multiple applicants over longer periods of time. And they are willing to spend quite a lot of money on the recruiting process. If you get much traction, you may find yourself in a situation where you're making peanuts off of ads or something, not even compensating your hosting costs or personal development time, while multiple huge companies are offering you big bucks if only you'll do a couple of things the way they want.
To my mind, this idea is similar to most CRM tools. Leads / Ops / Contacts / Email tracking etc. The only difference is that you're selling yourself instead of a product or service.
Another way to verify the need for this rather than asking directly would be to mockup some realistic screenshots, make a fancy launching soon website and harvest emails. If you get a bunch, go build it. If you get only a few, forget about it.
Trello seems like a perfect fit for this, for me at least. Just have different lists for different application statuses. Record special notes or links as comments on individual cards. I'm curious what more you have in mind that this approach wouldn't handle well.
I guess the main thing that would be missing is direct integration of emails sent to and from the various companies.
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I used Google sheet for this and found it useful. Each resume and cover letter is uniquely named for a given company/position along with other useful data such as advertised salary brief requirements etc. I also grab pdf copy of the job description.
Useful as it reminds me what I applied for when the recruiter calls me months after applying.
I'm using a spreadsheet to organize the job listings before I apply. Some columns include Job, Title, Industry, Salary, Notes, Distance from my house... If a job search portal was combined with a 'job application organizer' that would be a nice product.
I'm going to start looking for new job and an idea of tool for managing all this stuff came to my mind, but I probably won't build one. Separate mailbox and spreadsheet should be enough.
I don't think he means an applicant tracking system (ATS) as are used by recruiters and HR. They all suck though (even the paid ones are backwards in a data-science sense and lack intelligence that would now be possible with ML/data-science). And none of those are available as opensource at least not useable ones, so there is lots of room here for something that is transparent and can help harvest intelligence from the web.
I think what OP had in mind was a system that lets the job seeker track what was communicated and sent to a certain company. This is an awesome idea for many reasons: You could track which companies are notorious for failing to provide feedback to job seekers (even negative ones) or even shed light on which ones take ages to respond. It would be awesome to have a transparent infrastructure in place that is cloud based, open source, free, tracks these feedbacks in an "open/transparent" manner. I dislike the idea of tying into gmail (or facebook or google or other third party walled garden systems) though. I'd be happy to help on the technical side with requirements, use-cases and maybe even some funding.
Disclosure: one of my current companies works in recruitment but I have a SW development & infosec background. My profile has my contact details if interested.
The big problem with sourcing data from consumers that only have a temporary need for the service is that the average user isn't going to diligently update the system with all the feedback calls and emails they receive after they've accepted a job...
I suppose you could automate the data update process to the extent that commercial ATS vendors are willing to link up with your system via API. There are even job boards that send notifications when someone views your application, though as a candidate I'm not actually sure whether that makes me more or less concerned about not getting an email back from them...
I meant something that an actual applicant can use for their own personal use when job hunting. No bloatware, no job ads. Simple and plain organizer for hunting jobs. It is not something you'd use everyday, but once you're in the loop, a 1-3 month period is something normal for the job hunt. If you decide to comeback you'd have history of the jobs applied. Direct emails to recruiters, etc. So there is value.
Lets say you applied at Google/FB/Apple/30 Start Ups.
You have issues remembering all of the statuses of the applications, as trying to remember 30+ jobs is hard. Follow ups, Emails, Stages, Interesting Links you found on their recruiting process, To Dos, Resume Version sent (if you applied to couple of positions and highlighted different skills). Point of Contact, Last contact. List of contacts.
Report page showing companies with most interactions.
Offer page showing offers you have received and comparing them.
Potentially yes. I currently have about 20 applications and am not making any more for the moment, and while I'm managing to keep track of them in a spreadsheet, I have sacrificed some detail e.g. When multiple interview "rounds" happen on the same day, I treat them as one round. Sometimes I forget to mark whether a round was technical/non-technical. But that's just for my own records. Having something to compare offers - now that would be interesting
can you imagine what kind of pressure you would generate (possibly even turn a whole industry around) by shedding light onto which companies are constantly abusing the hiring process. Glassdoor started out with something like this but increasingly generates revenues from job-ads from the listed companies (and so has a conflict of interest pretty soon).
having a system like this gives you a massive amount of data which has immense value for visitors/users (and you as a company). Big players who are notoriously slow / lazy / arrogant in their feedback would get a real kick in their behind. The same with shady recruiters who are spoiling it for the few good ones.
I don't know how much people will apply for 30+ jobs, probably graduates? A tool targeting students could be useful. Most experienced job seekers only apply for a handful of positions.
Third party recruiters are the number one pain of the process. They don't respect candidates; they don't want to hear about your goals or your search constraints; they just aggressively talk over you. And I'm even talking about the so-called 'good' recruiters that you get referred to by word of mouth. Even they will break your heart.
The second pain point is well known: everyone uses different online application portals, and everyone has different requirements for manual data entry. I would have expected by now that applying at any company is as simple as just uploading a resume and clicking through some boilerplate agreements or ethnicity surveys that we would all be wise enough to always opt-out of. But I'm still dealing with application sites that look like they were built in 1995 and require upwards of 30 minutes of manual data entry.
Apps that could alleviate the pain of these issues would be way more valuable than organizational apps. The pain of the disorganization is just not that meaningful.