To keep track of job applications, give every role one row and record six things on it: the company and title, the link to the posting, the stage it is at, the full text of the job description, the day you applied, and the day you will chase it. Update the row the moment something happens, never in a Sunday catch-up session, because a tracker you refresh weekly is a tracker you have already stopped trusting. A spreadsheet handles this perfectly well for the first twenty or thirty roles. It starts failing when the column you want most is the one no cell can compute: how closely a given posting lines up with what you have actually written about yourself.
Where do you track job applications
Almost everyone starts in a sheet, and that is fine.
Ask this question anywhere people are job hunting in public and the answers land in four piles. A Google Sheet. An Excel file on the desktop. A Notion database that was beautiful for nine days. And, most commonly and least admitted, nothing at all: a browser with forty tabs, a folder of resume versions named final_v3_real, and a mental note that the company with the nice logo replied.
The sheet is the right first move. It costs nothing, it opens instantly, and it does not ask you to learn a product while you are already exhausted. If you have applied to fewer than a dozen roles and you can still name every one of them out loud, you do not have a tracking problem and no tool will invent one for you.
The trouble is that a job search does not stay small. It compounds quietly. You apply to four roles in a good week, you get two rejections and one silence, so you add six more. Somewhere in the forties the sheet stops being a record of your search and becomes a chore you are avoiding, and the avoidance is the actual failure. Not the tool. The friction.
So build the sheet properly the first time, with the columns that survive that growth, and know in advance what the sheet will never be able to do for you. Then the day it quits, you will recognise the moment instead of blaming yourself.
The schema
Ten columns for a job application tracker spreadsheet.
Build these in Excel or Google Sheets in about four minutes. Nothing here is a download, and nothing here needs a macro. Resist adding an eleventh column, because every column you add is a column you will start leaving blank.
Column 1
Company
Plain text. Not the recruiting agency, the actual employer. If you are going through an agency, put the agency in notes, because in three weeks you will not remember which of them owns the relationship.
Column 2
Role title
Copy the exact title from the posting, including the level. Senior and Staff and II are not decoration. When two companies interview you for jobs that sound identical, the title in this cell is how you keep them apart.
Column 3
Link to the posting
The URL, hyperlinked. It will eventually 404. That is expected and it is why the next column matters more than this one.
Column 4
The job description text
The whole thing, pasted into a cell or a linked doc. This is the column people skip and the one they miss most. A posting comes down the moment the role is filled or paused, and you will want its exact wording the night before an interview.
Column 5
Source
Where you found it: a board, a referral, a cold email, a company careers page. After thirty rows, sort by this column. The pattern in your interviews is usually louder than anything you will read in an advice thread.
Column 6
Date posted and date applied
Two separate dates. A posting that has been live for two months and a posting that went up on Tuesday are different bets, and applying within days of a posting going live is one of the few levers you fully control.
Column 7
Stage
Use a dropdown with a fixed list, never free text. Saved, applied, interview, offer, rejected. Five values. The moment you allow yourself to type "applied?" into this cell, filtering breaks and the sheet is decorative.
Column 8
Follow up on
A date, set at the same moment you set the applied date. Not "soon". Not a mental note. A cell with a date in it that you can sort by, because sorting by this column is the entire point of the sheet on a Monday morning.
Column 9
Contact
The human being. Recruiter name, hiring manager, the person who referred you. A search that goes well goes well through people, and the name of the person is the thing you will fumble in the follow-up email.
Column 10
Notes
Free text, and let it be messy. The salary number they floated. The thing the manager said about the team being rebuilt. The reason you were rejected, if they told you. Write it the same day, because a week later you will be inventing it.
The habit
How to actually keep the thing up to date.
The schema is easy. The discipline is the product. Four rules, and they are the only reason a tracker survives past its first month.
Add the row before you apply, not after.
The row is created the second you decide a job is worth a look, in the saved stage. This sounds like a small inversion and it is not. It means the sheet holds your pipeline, not just your history, and a saved list that never shrinks is a message about the roles you are quietly afraid of.
Update at the event, never in a batch.
Rejection email arrives, you change the cell right then, in the thirty seconds you are already annoyed. Nobody in the history of job hunting has ever completed a Sunday evening tracker reconciliation session. Planning to do one is the same as planning to stop.
Set the follow-up date while you still care.
The minute you hit submit you are the most motivated you will ever be about that company. Spend two of those seconds putting a date in the follow-up cell. A week later gives the team room to move and keeps you visible. Two weeks is still entirely reasonable. Zero is a coin flip you did not have to take.
Sort by follow-up date every Monday.
One sort, one filter, five minutes. Everything with a date in the past gets an email or gets closed out. This is the only recurring ritual the system needs, and it replaces the low hum of anxiety about whether you have forgotten someone.
The three walls
Exactly where a spreadsheet stops working.
Wall one is attrition. There is a number of applications past which you personally stop updating the sheet, and for most people it lands somewhere around forty. Not because forty is magic, but because by then the search has been running long enough that the sheet has accumulated stale rows, and opening a document to face your own stale rows is an unpleasant thing to ask of yourself on a Tuesday night. The failure is emotional, not technical, and no amount of conditional formatting fixes it.
Wall two is that a cell cannot read. The most valuable question in a job search is not "did I apply" but "should I, and if I do, what am I missing". A spreadsheet has no opinion about whether the posting in column four lines up with what you have written about yourself. It can hold the job description. It cannot weigh it. So the analysis either happens in your head, unevenly and optimistically, or it does not happen.
Wall three is the handoff. Say you do the analysis anyway, by hand, and you work out that this posting keeps saying three things your resume never says. Now what. You open a different tool, find the right resume version, retype the fix, re-export the PDF, rename the file, and come back to update a cell. That round trip is where tailoring dies. Everyone knows they should tailor. Almost nobody does it forty times, because the tax is paid per application and the sheet does not help you pay it.
A tracker that is a separate product from your resume does not solve wall three either. It moves it. You still export a CSV or copy keywords into a second tool. The only version of this that actually closes is the one where the record of the job and the document you send are the same account.
Honest comparison
Three ways people keep track, side by side.
This is a real trade and pretending otherwise would be insulting. A sheet wins on control and on the fact that you already know how to use it. Here is what it costs you.
| Capability | Folio | Excel or Google Sheets | Inbox plus memory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to set up | Sign up, then add the first role. No template to configure. | Four minutes for the columns above, plus whatever you spend on formatting you did not need. | None. That is the appeal, and it is the whole of the appeal. |
| Survives fifty applications | Five fixed stages and a board view. Nothing to leave blank and nothing to reformat. | Only if you keep updating it. Most sheets go quiet somewhere in the forties. | No. You will apply to the same company twice and find out from the recruiter. |
| Keeps the posting after it is deleted | The job description is stored on the card and stays there through every stage. | Yes, if you paste it in. Most people paste the link and not the text. | No. The tab is closed and the URL is a 404. |
| Tells you what the posting wants that you never said | A 0 to 100 match score against your profile, with the missing terms named. Computed on Folio, no external model. | No. A cell cannot weigh a job description against your experience. | No, unless you count optimism as a method. |
| Turns that finding into a better resume | Edit the profile, rebuild the resume, export the PDF or DOCX. Same login, no file shuffling. | You retype the fix in whatever tool holds your resume, then come back. | You send the same resume you sent last time and hope. |
| Reminds you to follow up | A follow-up date on the card, set next to the applied date, sortable across the board. | A date in a column that you have to remember to look at. | You remember on a Thursday, three weeks late, at 1am. |
| Cost | The board, the five stages, and the match score are free. The resume PDF and DOCX are free and unwatermarked. | Free, and you are the maintenance team. | Free, and expensive. |
Folio does not offer a spreadsheet template, an .xlsx export, a browser extension, or auto-apply. If a downloadable tracker template is what you want, build the ten columns above yourself in the sheet you already have. That is a completely legitimate answer and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
The mapping
What each spreadsheet column becomes in Folio, including the three that do not map.
If you migrate, migrate with your eyes open. Folio has a fixed set of fields on a job card, and three of the ten columns above do not have one. Here is exactly where everything lands.
Direct
Company, role, link, location
These are first-class fields on the card. Company name, role title, the job URL, and the location, each on its own line and each searchable from the board.
Direct
The job description
Paste the posting into the card. It is stored with the role permanently, and it is the input the match score reads. This one column is the reason the migration is worth doing.
Direct
Stage
Five stages, hard-coded: saved, applied, interview, offer, rejected. The same five you were supposed to be using as a dropdown. Drag the card and the order sticks.
Direct
Date applied and follow up on
Two dates on the card, exactly as in the sheet. One records what you did. One records what you owe. That is the whole follow-up system and it does not need a plugin.
Direct
Salary and notes
A salary note field for the number they floated, and a free-text notes field for everything else. Both private, neither published anywhere.
No field
Source, date posted, and contact
Say it plainly: the card has no dedicated column for where you found the role, when it was posted, or the recruiter name. Put them at the top of the notes field. If you need to slice your search by source, keep the sheet for that and use the board for the work.
New
The match score
The column a spreadsheet could never give you. Folio scores the pasted job description against your profile from 0 to 100 and lists the terms the posting leans on that your profile never uses.
New
The resume in the next tab
Because the tracker and the resume builder are one account, closing a gap is an edit and a re-export, not a migration between two products. This is the wall that a standalone tracker cannot take down.
The numbers, stated exactly
What the match score is, and what it is not.
You should never take a career grade from a black box. The method is fully described, it runs on Folio, and the same inputs always produce the same number.
What it will not do
The limits, before you find them yourself.
Folio will not apply to jobs for you. There is no browser extension, no form filler, no bot pressing submit on a portal overnight. You paste the posting in, which costs about twenty seconds and has the useful side effect of making you read the thing you are about to apply to.
The match score reads your Folio profile: your headline, your bio, your outcomes, your skills. It does not open a PDF you uploaded and grade the file. That is on purpose. Your profile is the source the resume is generated from, so a fix to the profile propagates to the resume, the cover letter, and your portfolio site at once. A fix to a PDF only ever fixes that PDF.
Folio also shows you no reply rate and no response percentage, because it has no way of knowing whether an employer opened anything. Any product that shows you a response rate is quietly reporting the statuses you typed in yourself, dressed up as insight. You already know what you typed.
And to be straight about the Free plan while we are being straight about everything else: the tracker, the five stages, the match score, and the resume PDF and DOCX cost nothing, but Free gives you a portfolio.wrxstack.com address rather than a domain of your own, keeps a Made with Folio credit on your site, caps AI drafting at 10 generations a month, and reserves the full theme gallery for Pro. Track your applications for free. Just do not expect a free domain from anyone, including us.
Frequently asked questions
Where do most people track job applications?
In a Google Sheet or an Excel file, overwhelmingly, and after that in a Notion database that gets abandoned faster than either. The forum answer to this question is almost always some version of "a sheet, until I stopped opening the sheet". That second clause is the important half, and it is the reason the question keeps getting asked.
What is the best way to keep track of job applications?
Whatever you will still be updating in week six. That is the whole test, and it rules out anything that takes more than a few seconds per event. Give each role one record, fix the stage list to five values so it stays sortable, store the posting text and not only the link, and put a real date in a follow-up field the moment you submit. Everything past that is preference.
How do I build a job application tracker in Excel or Google Sheets?
Open a blank sheet, make the first row your headers, and use these ten: company, role title, link, job description, source, date posted, date applied, stage, follow up on, contact, notes. Make the stage column a dropdown restricted to saved, applied, interview, offer and rejected so it never becomes free text. Freeze the header row, sort by the follow-up date each Monday, and you have a system that will carry you for a good while. Folio does not hand out a template file for this, so build it in the sheet you already have.
Can a tracker tell me the status of my application at a company?
No, and be sceptical of anything that claims otherwise. The employer has its own applicant tracking system, that system is private to them, and nothing you install can look inside it. What a personal tracker records is your side of the exchange: what you sent, when you sent it, what they said back. The status you see is the status you entered.
How long should you wait before following up on a job application?
About a week after you submit is a comfortable window, and a fortnight is still well within the bounds of normal. The mistake is not picking wrong, it is never picking, so decide the date at the moment you apply and write it down somewhere that will confront you later. In Folio that date sits on the job card beside the applied date, so the board raises its hand instead of waiting for you to feel guilty.
Is the Folio job application tracker free, and does it apply for me?
The tracker is free, with no plan gate on the board, the stages, or the job-description match, and the resume you attach exports to PDF or DOCX at no cost and with no watermark. It does not apply for you. Folio ships no browser extension and no auto-apply, so submitting the application stays your job, which is the part that should stay yours anyway.