Stages
Saved, applied, interview, offer, rejected
Five stages, not fifteen. Drag a card between columns and the order sticks. Anything more granular is a status you will stop updating by week two.
Job application tracker
The job application tracker that sits next to the resume you send.
A job application tracker is one place that holds every role you are chasing, the stage each one is at, and what you owe that employer next. Folio gives you one at no cost, with five stages: saved, applied, interview, offer, and rejected. Each role is a card carrying the company, the job link, the location, a salary note, the pasted job description, your private notes, the date you applied, and the date you plan to follow up. Because the tracker shares an account with your resume, cover letter, and portfolio, a job description you paste is scored against your profile immediately, and the gap it finds is one tab away from being closed.
Put every open application on one board.
Sign up with an email, a Google account, or a passkey. The board, the five stages, the match score, and the resume PDF you attach to those applications all sit on the Free plan. What Free leaves out: no custom domain, a Made with Folio credit stays on your site, and AI drafting stops at 10 generations a month.
- to track every role you apply to
- $0
- no plan gate anywhere on the tracker
How to keep track of job applications
Five minutes of setup, then one card per role.
The reason most job searches fall apart is not effort. It is that the record of the search lives in three places: a spreadsheet, a browser tab, and your memory. Collapse it into one.
01
Add the role the moment you see it.
Paste the job link, the title, and the company. The card opens in the saved stage, which is the honest label for a job you have not applied to yet. A saved column you never clear is a signal worth reading.
02
Paste the job description into the card.
This is the step people skip, and it is the step that pays. The description is stored on the card, so when a recruiter calls three weeks later you still know exactly what the job asked for.
03
Read the match score before you apply, not after.
Folio scores that description against your profile from 0 to 100 and lists the terms the job leans on that your profile never mentions. Fix the profile, then rebuild the resume from it. That order matters.
04
Move the card and set the follow-up date.
When you submit, move the card to applied. The applied date is stamped on the card, and you set the follow-up date right there, while you still care about the outcome.
05
Let interview, offer, and rejected do the accounting.
The board shows you the shape of your search at a glance: how much is stalled in saved, how much is waiting in applied, what is actually live. Rejected cards stay, because the job description on them is still worth rereading.
What is on a card
Every field exists because a job search needs it.
No custom-field builder, no view configuration, no onboarding tour. The card holds what you will actually want at 9pm on a Tuesday.
Job description
The posting, kept after it is taken down
Postings vanish. Paste the description into the card and it stays yours, which is what you want the night before the interview when the original URL is a 404.
Match
A 0 to 100 score with the missing terms named
The score is computed on Folio, in the request, with no external model involved. It also names the specific words the job description emphasizes that your profile never uses.
Dates
Applied on, follow up on
Two dates per card. One records what you did, one records what you owe. That is the entire follow-up system, and it beats a reminder you never set.
Context
Link, location, salary note, private notes
The recruiter name, the number they floated, the thing the hiring manager said about the team. Write it on the card while it is fresh, because you will not remember it in March.
One account
The resume you are tracking is in the next tab
The tracker, the resume builder, the cover letter, and the portfolio site are one login and one record. Change your profile once and every downstream document reflects it.
Spreadsheet or tracker
What a spreadsheet cannot do, and what a tracker app usually will not.
A spreadsheet is a genuinely fine start, and most people should not feel bad about using one. It only fails at the moment the record needs to change the resume.
| Capability | Folio | Excel or Google Sheets | A standalone tracker app |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost of tracking the applications | Free. No entitlement gates the board, the stages, or the match score. | Free, and you build and maintain the template yourself. | Often free to start, with the useful analysis reserved for the paid tier. |
| Scoring the posting against you | A 0 to 100 score with the missing keywords listed, computed on Folio with no external model. | None. A spreadsheet cell cannot read a job description. | Usually available, and usually the feature behind the upgrade prompt. |
| Acting on what the score found | Edit the profile, rebuild the resume, and export the PDF in the same account. No handoff. | You retype the fix into whatever tool holds your resume. | You export a CSV or copy the keywords into a second product. |
| Downloading the resume you attach | PDF and DOCX, free, unwatermarked, every layout available on the Free plan. | Not applicable. The spreadsheet does not build the resume. | A paid plan is commonly required before the file downloads clean. |
| Auto-apply and browser extensions | Neither. Folio does not apply to jobs for you and ships no extension. You paste the posting. | Neither, obviously. | Often the headline feature, and often the reason the tool is priced. |
| Where a recruiter lands after the click | Your portfolio site and hosted resume, in the same account, on the same profile. | Wherever your LinkedIn link points, which is a page you do not control. | Out of scope. Trackers track, they do not publish. |
Competitor cells describe the shape of the trade published by tracker products, not any specific price. Check the current tier page before you pay for anything.
The numbers behind the score
How the match is computed, stated exactly.
You should not have to trust a black box that grades your career. Here is the whole method.
5
stages on the board
saved, applied, interview, offer, rejected
0 to 100
match score per job description
deterministic, same input gives the same score
60 / 40
keyword coverage vs topical similarity
coverage weighs more, because it answers "did I mention it"
$0
to export the resume you attach
PDF and DOCX, no watermark, on Free
What this is not
The tracker does not apply for you, and it never reads your PDF.
Two products in this category lead with a browser extension that fills forms and fires off applications. Folio does not do that. There is no extension, no auto-apply, and no bot clicking submit on a portal at 3am. You paste the posting yourself, which takes about twenty seconds and has the side effect of making you read it.
The match score reads your Folio profile record: your headline, your bio, your outcomes, and your skills. It does not open a resume file you uploaded and grade the document. That distinction is deliberate. The profile is the source your resume is generated from, so fixing the profile fixes the resume, the cover letter, and the portfolio at once. Fixing a PDF fixes a PDF.
Folio also reports no reply rate, no response percentage, and no conversion funnel, because it cannot see whether an employer opened anything. Any tool that shows you a response rate is counting the statuses you typed in yourself. You already know what those say.
What you get instead is a board that is honest about where the search actually stands, and a one-click path from "this posting wants three things I never wrote down" to a rebuilt resume that says them.
FAQ
Honest answers.
How do I keep track of job applications?
Give every role one card and update it at the moment something happens, never in a weekly catch-up session. A card needs six things: the company, the link, the stage it is at, the posting text, the day you applied, and the day you will chase it. Folio holds all six and adds a match score, so the board tells you what to fix and not only what you sent.
Is the job application tracker free?
Yes. No entitlement key gates the board, the five stages, or the job-description match, so nothing in the tracker is reserved for a paid plan. Being straight about the rest of Free: you get a portfolio.wrxstack.com/yourname address rather than a domain of your own, a Made with Folio credit appears on your site, AI drafting is capped at 10 generations a month, and the full 60-theme portfolio gallery is a Pro thing. The resume PDF and DOCX you attach to applications are free with no watermark.
Is an Excel or Google Sheets job tracker good enough?
For the first dozen applications, honestly, yes. A sheet starts breaking when the useful column is the one a spreadsheet cannot compute: how well this specific posting lines up with what you have actually written about yourself. At that point you are copying job descriptions between tabs and retyping keywords into a resume tool, and the sheet has become a to-do list about a to-do list.
How long should I wait before following up on an application?
Choose the date while you are submitting, not a fortnight later when the enthusiasm has drained away. A week gives a hiring team room to move without letting you disappear; two weeks is still perfectly polite. Folio stores that date on the card next to the applied date, so the decision is made once and the board remembers it for you.
Does Folio apply to jobs for me or have a browser extension?
No to both, and that is a design decision rather than a roadmap gap. There is no extension to install and no auto-apply queue. You paste the posting into a card yourself. The trade you get for those twenty seconds is that the same posting is instantly scored against your profile and can rewrite your resume, which a form-filler cannot do.
What does the match score actually read?
It reads the profile record you keep in Folio: headline, bio, outcomes, and skills. It weighs how much of the salient vocabulary in the posting your profile covers at 0.6, and overall topical overlap at 0.4, then reports a band and the exact terms you are missing. It does not scan an uploaded resume file, and it never sends your text to an outside model.
How many roles can I keep on the board?
There is no Pro-only ceiling on the number of cards. Track three roles or track sixty. What is worth watching is not the total but the shape: a saved column that keeps growing while the applied column does not usually means the postings are scaring you, and the fastest cure is to open one and read what it says you are missing.
Keep going
Explore the rest of Folio.
ATS resume checkerScore the resume against the posting on the card, and fix it in the same window.Resume builderBuild the resume the tracker attaches, and export the PDF free with no watermark.Cover letter generatorTurn a pasted job description into a letter that matches the resume you sent.How ATS resume screening worksWhat happens to an application after you drag the card to applied.PricingWhat Free covers, what Pro adds, and where the line honestly falls.Free resume builderWhat Folio does for "free resume builder with free pdf download", and where the free plan stops.Free CV makerWhat Folio does for "cv maker", and where the free plan stops.Resume websiteWhat Folio does for "how to build a resume website", and where the free plan stops.The Folio ATS Score standardThe full rubric, published: 7 weighted criteria, the bands, and what the score cannot do.