J is for… Job hunting

Job Hunting is a complex topic. I am not job hunting at the moment, but following graduation I extensively used a variety of notebooks and websites to assist. I have also used a variety of inserts that I hope to use as a basis for another organisational notebook in the future.  A key part of the job hunting process is being organised about your job hunting routine and I wrote about Job Applications in my 2012 A-to Z (different blog) .

In summary I wrote about how I used Gmail to track job applications:

• All job applications are labelled “job application” to begin with.
• The automated reply that you get from firms I use the yellow star to show the application has been received. The yellow star remains until I get either a rejection or interview so I know I’m still awaiting a reply.
• The yellow star moves to the next email received from that firm if it is an additional email stating when you should hear by.
• When I have received a rejection from a particular firm I use the red exclamation mark as the star (need to enable superstars) and remove the yellow star from the original email from that firm to show that they have responded.
• When I get an interview the same thing applies only it is a green tick star.
• The system means that any yellow stars remaining after a period of time are the ones they you are still awaiting replies on.
• After interview replies, if they are rejections, but provide feedback, I will blue star these. This is because I will look at the feedback again, to help me progress, if it is a simple rejection with a contact number to phone, or they don’t have time to provide feedback, it gets the usual red exclamation mark treatment.

At the time (pre-Filofax) I kept this in conjunction with my desk diary.

Last month I had post-grad that I had been talking to about career prospects (and funnily enough filofaxes) ask me how to organise their job hunting in their Filofax. They kept brief notes in their diary (such as deadlines) but thought they would benefit from a more specific job hunting focus (and something to put under ‘j’ in their A-to-Z dividers).

So I thought about it and came up with this design which I sent to him direct but I thought I would share this on the blog in case there were any other job-seekers out there who would benefit from this filofax insert.

Filofax or otherwise, how do you keep on top of your applications?

Download: Job Hunting Inserts