The Job Application Tracker That Tells You Why You're Not Hearing Back

You've applied to sixty jobs. Maybe eighty. You had a spreadsheet for the first twenty and then it got messy and you stopped updating it. You're getting rejections, or worse, nothing at all, and you can't tell whether the problem is your CV, your experience, the market, or something else entirely.

A tracker won't fix your CV. But a good one will tell you which problem you actually have — and most trackers don't, because they're missing one column.

What a job application tracker is actually for

Most people treat a tracker as a memory aid. Something to stop you applying to the same company twice, or to remember which recruiter said they'd follow up on Tuesday.

That's the boring half. The useful half is that a tracker is the only dataset you have about your own job search. Sixty applications is a sample size. If you record the right fields, that sample tells you things nobody else can:

• Whether you're being filtered out at CV screen or at first call
• Whether certain role titles convert and others don't
• Whether one channel is doing all the work
• Whether your response rate is a CV problem or a timing problem

That last one is the one nobody tracks. We'll come back to it.

The columns that earn their place

Every tracker template on the internet gives you fifteen columns and you fill in four. Here is the minimum set that actually produces signal. Copy it into Google Sheets, Excel, or Notion — the tool matters far less than the schema.

Ten columns. If a column doesn't feed a decision you'll actually make, cut it.

Two things worth setting up once. Add a formula column for Date applied - Date posted and call it Days late. And add conditional formatting so a row goes amber at fourteen days without movement and red at twenty-eight. That's the entire build. Fifteen minutes.

The column everyone leaves out: date posted

Here's the thing that changed how I think about job searching, and eventually the reason I built ReqHunt.

When you apply matters enormously, and almost nobody measures it.

Recruiters work a requisition in waves. The first batch of applications gets read carefully, because the pipeline is empty and the hiring manager is keen. By the time a posting has two hundred applicants, the reading gets faster and shallower, and at some point the recruiter is no longer looking for reasons to advance you. They're looking for reasons to cut the pile down. Some roles are effectively decided before they're formally closed, with the posting left up because nobody took it down.

So being early is a lever. It costs you nothing, requires no CV rewrite, and is completely invisible unless you track it.

After twenty or thirty applications, filter your tracker by outcome and look at the average Days late for each group. Almost everyone I've shown this to finds the same thing: the applications that got a response were the ones sent within the first few days.

If your median lag is eleven days, you don't have a CV problem. You have a discovery problem. Those are fixed very differently — and if you're still not sure whether the screening software is the culprit, here's what an ATS resume really is.

Why your lag is probably worse than you think

Here's where it gets uncomfortable. If you're finding roles on the big aggregators, your lag isn't mostly your procrastination. It's structural.

A job posting starts life on the employer's applicant tracking system. The company's careers page and its ATS board are live the moment the recruiter hits publish. Everything downstream — aggregators, job boards, the "recommended for you" feed — is a copy, and copies arrive late. Sometimes hours. Often days. Sometimes the role never gets syndicated at all, because the company never paid to promote it or never connected the feed.

This is the "hidden job market" people talk about, except it isn't hidden and it isn't a market. It's just jobs that are publicly posted on company ATS boards and haven't been copied anywhere you're looking yet. There's no networking trick required. You have to be looking at the source instead of the copy.

Why I built ReqHunt

I should be straight about why a job board founder is telling you to build a spreadsheet.

I've spent my career in tech, at Amazon, Google, and Spotify. Which means I've been on both sides of this: inside companies watching how requisitions actually get worked, and outside them, job hunting across Europe like everyone else, checking the same aggregators every morning and waiting for a feed to show me something.

The thing that eventually clicked was that I kept finding roles by accident. I'd end up on some company's careers page, see something that fit, and realise it had been sitting there for days without ever reaching me through any of the channels I was watching. Not one company. Constantly.

So I did what you do when you can write code and you're annoyed. I wrote a script that checked a handful of company ATS boards on a schedule and emailed me when something new appeared. It was ugly and it worked, and within a couple of weeks I was applying to things on the day they went up instead of the following week.

That script became ReqHunt. It polls employer ATS boards directly — Ashby, Greenhouse, Lever, Workable, Recruitee, SmartRecruiters, Teamtailor, Personio — with a European focus, meaning companies actually posting roles in European cities rather than just companies headquartered here.

When a role goes up, it's in the catalog within the hour, because we're reading the same source the company publishes to. There's no syndication step to wait on.

That's the entire premise. It isn't clever. It's just closer to the source than the alternatives, and closeness to the source is exactly what your Days late column measures.

How to actually use the tracker

A tracker you update sporadically is worse than none, because you'll draw conclusions from a biased sample. Same time every week, fifteen minutes:

1. Close the loop on stale rows. Anything red, mark it Ghosted. It's not a rejection and it's not pending. Ghosted is a status and it belongs in your data.
2. Check your lag. Look at last week's Days late numbers. If the median is above five, your problem that week was discovery, not applications.
3. Check conversion by source. If referrals convert at forty percent and one aggregator converts at two, you know where next week's hours go.
4. Check conversion by role title. Two similar titles often convert very differently. That's information about how you're being read, and it's cheap to act on.
5. Stop there. Five minutes of numbers, ten minutes of updates, close the tab.

Where the spreadsheet stops

I'll be honest about the limits of what I've just given you, because a tracker is a recording tool and most of your problem is upstream of recording.

The tracker tells you your lag is eleven days. It does nothing to make it one. That part is manual: you'd have to know which companies to watch, check each of their boards regularly, and notice new postings faster than everyone else checking the same boards. That's a job, and you already have one, or you're trying to get one.

That's the gap ReqHunt fills. You set your criteria once — role, location, seniority, remote or not — and every hour we check the catalog against it. New matches, from the source, before the copies land.

There's also Fast Apply, which handles the other half of the friction. You store your professional details once, and when you open a posting you get a structured sheet with every field ready to copy, in the order the form asks for them. It doesn't submit anything for you. You stay in control of every application and you confirm when you've actually applied. But it turns twenty minutes of retyping your own address into about three.

Frequently asked questions

How do I find the date a job was posted?

Some postings state it. Many don't, and some aggregators show a "posted date" that's the date they indexed it, not the date the employer published, which is exactly the number you don't want. Company ATS boards are more reliable. Every listing in ReqHunt carries the date we first saw it on the employer's own board.

How many jobs should I be applying to per week?

Fewer than you think, if you're early to them. A tailored application sent on day one beats five generic ones sent on day ten. Your tracker will show you this in your own numbers within a month.

Should I apply to old postings at all?

Sometimes. Roles reopen, pipelines fall through, and some companies hire continuously. But sort your effort by freshness, and don't let a four-week-old posting eat the hours you could spend on something published yesterday.

Is Google Sheets, Excel, or Notion better for this?

Sheets if you care about the analysis, because the summary formulas are easiest there. Notion if a kanban board is the thing that will make you actually open it. Excel if you are offline or you prefer pivot tables. The ten-column schema described above works identically in all three.

Does ReqHunt cover roles outside Europe?

The catalog is European-focused by design, meaning companies posting roles in European cities rather than only companies headquartered in Europe.

Start here

Build the ten-column sheet. Add your last ten applications, including the date each was posted. Look at your lag. That number is your diagnosis.

If it's high, the fix isn't working harder on applications. It's getting to the postings sooner.