The IterJobs team ·
A job search spreadsheet template that actually lasts
The exact columns to use in a job application tracker, why most templates fall apart, and the three signs it's time to move to a real tracker.
Spreadsheets are how most job searches start — and for the first ten applications, they’re genuinely good. The trouble is that the spreadsheet you build on day one is rarely the one you need in week six.
Here’s a template that holds up, and the point where it stops being enough.
The columns that matter
Keep it to one row per application:
| Column | Why it’s there |
|---|---|
Date applied | Sorts your week; tells you what to follow up on |
Company | The obvious one |
Role | Titles repeat across companies; the role is what differs |
Source | The only way to learn which channels work |
Status | A fixed vocabulary, so you can count |
Next step | What you owe them, or what they owe you |
Contact | Name and email of the human you’re talking to |
URL | The posting changes or disappears; keep the link |
Notes | One line per stage change, with the date |
Location / pay | So you don’t re-interview for something you’d refuse |
That’s it. Resist the urge to add a column per interview round — that’s what breaks templates.
Three things that break a spreadsheet
1. Interview rounds don’t fit. A company can have a recruiter screen, a hiring-manager call, a take-home, an onsite and a final round. If you put each one in a column, your sheet is now mostly empty cells. If you put them all in one “Notes” cell, you lose the dates — and the dates are the whole point.
2. The status column drifts. Someone writes “phone screen”, then “Phone Screen”, then “screen”. Now you can’t count anything, and the one benefit of the sheet — a view of the pipeline — is gone.
3. It lives on one machine. You apply on your phone during lunch and on your laptop at night. A file in a folder doesn’t follow you, and a synced sheet invites merge conflicts.
When to move to a real tracker
You’ve outgrown the spreadsheet when any of these is true:
- You’ve added interview rounds, and the rows have turned into a wall of text.
- You want to ask “which source converts best?” and can’t answer it without an hour of cleanup.
- You’ve lost a follow-up because it lived in a cell you never scrolled back to.
A dedicated tracker keeps one row per application and a proper list per round, so the pipeline stays clean and the per-stage dates survive. It also gives you the picture a spreadsheet can’t: source → stage → outcome, at a glance.
Moving your data across
You don’t have to retype anything. Export your sheet as CSV, and import it. IterJobs reads
columns like Company, Role, Status, Source, DateApplied and
the rest — previews the rows, and flags anything malformed before it commits. Rows you’ve
already imported are skipped as duplicates, so a second import is safe.
Start the search in whichever tool you like. Just pick one that can hold a history, or you’ll be rebuilding this sheet in a month.