By your fifteenth application, you will not remember which company asked for a portfolio, which one ghosted you, or whether you already followed up with the recruiter who said next week. A tracker spreadsheet fixes that. It does not need to be clever. It needs to be the one place you check before you apply again or send a follow-up.

The columns that actually earn their place

Start minimal. Every extra column is one more thing to fill in, and the more friction, the sooner you abandon it. These eight cover almost everything:

• Company and Role, the basics
• Date applied, so you know when a follow-up is due
• Source, the job board, referral, or direct link, so you learn what works
• Status, applied, screening, interview, offer, or rejected
• Contact, the recruiter or hiring manager name and email
• Next action, the single most useful column, more below
• Link, to the posting, before it expires

Make next action the heart of it

Most trackers die because they record the past but say nothing about what to do next. Add a Next action column and a Due date next to it. Follow up with Marta on June 6 turns a static log into a to-do list. Sort by due date each morning and your job search runs itself.

Skip the columns that feel productive but are not

Resist the urge to track salary expectations, your mood after each interview, or a one-to-ten excitement score. They feel thorough and they are the first things you stop updating. A tracker you keep simple is a tracker you keep.

Use color, but only for status

Conditional formatting on the Status column is the one bit of polish worth setting up. Green for offer, red for rejected, yellow for waiting. A glance at the colors tells you where your pipeline stands without reading a single word.

The best tracker is the one you open daily. Every feature you add is a small tax on that habit, so add carefully.

Keep it alive past week two

The spreadsheet only works if updating it is part of applying, not a separate chore. Make the rule simple: the moment you hit submit on an application, you add the row before you close the tab. Pair it with a weekly five-minute review where you update statuses and set next actions. That review is also when you spot patterns, like a job board that never converts or a CV version that gets more callbacks.

If you are tailoring each application, note which CV version you sent in a small column too. When a tool like Postulit helps you spin up a targeted CV per role, the tracker is where you record which one went where, so a callback two weeks later does not catch you guessing.

Start today, refine later

Do not spend an evening building the perfect template. Open a blank sheet, add the eight columns, and log your last three applications from memory. A rough tracker you use beats a beautiful one you admire and abandon.