A job application tracker spreadsheet (free)

Past the tenth application they all blur together. Which company, applied when, which one replied, which one has been silent for three weeks — this is not work memory can do.

There is a free spreadsheet below. But first, one thing worth knowing: most "job application tracker templates" you find online are built for recruiters. They are designed to track candidates arriving at one job posting, not the dozens of applications you sent out. Those two run in opposite directions.

Download it

job-application-tracker.xlsx — works in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice. No signup, no email.

Turkish-headed version: is-basvuru-takip-sablonu.xlsx

What is in it

Two tabs. Applications is the one you fill in, nine columns:

• Company, Job Title — what the application is
• Applied At — where the waiting clock starts
• Status — picked from a dropdown
• Location — remote/hybrid goes here too
• Job URL — so you still know what you applied to after the posting comes down
• Last Activity — when something last happened: an email, an interview, anything
• Waiting (days) — calculated for you, nothing to type
• Notes — interview notes, salary range, who you spoke to

You fill in nothing on the Summary tab; it is all derived from the first one: total applications, still waiting, got a reply, rejected, reply rate, and the average wait of the applications still open.

Two design choices are worth explaining:

Waiting is counted from last activity, not from the application date. Put a date in "Last Activity" and the clock restarts there; leave it blank and it counts from when you applied. Because what you actually want to know is not "when did I apply" but "when did something last happen". An application where you interviewed three weeks ago and then heard nothing is not the same thing as one you sent three weeks ago and never heard about at all.

A rejection counts as a reply. The "reply rate" on the Summary tab includes rejections. That sounds backwards until you notice what it measures: not "did I get hired" but "did a human being look at my application". A 5% reply rate tells you something is wrong with your CV or with the roles you are aiming at — far earlier and far more clearly than an offer count ever will.

How to use it

Add the row as you apply. Reconstructing later does not work: even on LinkedIn getting the history out is its own errand, and anything you sent through a company's own site was never recorded anywhere.

Look at the Summary tab once a week and ask two questions:

1. Are there open applications past 30 days of waiting? They are not open any more. Close them. (When to write one off is its own question.)
2. Is the reply rate falling? If it is, the problem is not the number of applications — it is the CV or the targeting.

If you already have a LinkedIn history

You can paste Job Applications.csv from your LinkedIn data archive straight into this sheet — the columns are not identical, but company, title and date carry over directly. How to get that file is in this article.

Where a spreadsheet stops working — honestly

A spreadsheet, even a good one, cannot do three things:

It does not update itself. Every rejection email, every interview invitation, you open and type in yourself. In a busy week this is the first thing to slip, and within days the sheet no longer matches reality.

Nothing reminds you. "This one has been silent for 21 days" is in the sheet, but nobody says it out loud unless you open the sheet.

You learn nothing at the company level. Three applications to the same company are three unrelated rows; seeing whether that company replies to anyone at all means grouping by hand.

Up to thirty or forty applications none of this really matters. Beyond that the spreadsheet becomes a job of its own, separate from the job hunt — and that is the real cost.