Depending on your age, you may or may not know what a checkbook register is. For the millenials out there, once upon a time (before PayPal and online banking), everyone paid their bills with a paper check. For those who were responsible, they recorded that payment in a little book that was usually attached to one’s checkbook.
It looks like a little Excel spreadsheet and you would write a check, then flip open the register, and write down basically the same information that you wrote on the check. You would do a little math and at the bottom of the register you knew exactly how much money you had left in your checking account. There’s nothing magical about this. It’s perhaps the simplest aspect of personal finance and if you do it consistently, you stay out of trouble. Every now and then something bad would happen: you would skip the math part or make an error and a few days later you’d make the embarrassing discovery that you bounced a check and got penalized for it. Ouch! $35 gone.
When you apply for a job, you’re doing something very much like writing a check; you’re sending out information about personal matters and you’re involved in the accounting practice of your own career. Today, I want to introduce you to the idea and discipline of keeping a jobs-applied register. I’ll explain why this simple habit can help you in your pursuits of your next career or keep you from being “bounced” from consideration for a job because you didn’t keep track of your resume.
In the current talent market, most employers use recruiting software; we call it applicant tracking software. This is the software that makes you create a user name and password. It requires you to upload a resume. It asks you questions about all sorts of things, most of which are typical employment application questions but some are highly specific to a job that you’re applying for.
I am not a fan of big data and I am discomforted with the idea that there is a hefty amount of information about me stored in massive databases. At the expense of sounding Orwellian, Big Brother knows a lot more about you than you could possibly imagine. Potential employers know a lot about you, as well. We make decisions about applicants based on the information that we collect. You should be collecting and maintaining a similar amount of application information. Why should you do this? What good could possibly come from keeping an organized journal of where you’ve applied and where you are in the process? What information should you track? How should you track it? In no specific order, here are some answers to those questions. I’ve boiled this down to simple items that should not require a lot of time nor a tremendous amount of critical thinking.
Create an Excel spreadsheet. From left to right, you’re going to create columns. The columns are labeled company name, job title, where you first heard about the job, the company website, the career page website, the date you discovered the job, the date that the job was first published, the date that you applied to the job, the username and password that you used to create your job-seeker account, the version of the resume that you supplied, the version of the cover letter that you supplied, unusual questions that may have been asked of you during the application process, the answers that you supplied to those questions, the names of anyone that you know who works at that company, a box for you to collect on-going notes about your interviews or interactions, and finally, a box that describes next steps in the process. Quite candidly, I can think of at least a dozen more columns that should be included but I’ve listed the essential elements of your job-seeker database. The bottom line is this: you need to become a big-data of your own sorts and this is how you build your employer big-database.
Why would this be helpful? The short answer is that the job-seeking process is complicated and has lots of moving parts. It’s gotten to the point that there is so much information involved in the job search that the human brain simply struggles to keep track of it all and this is mechanism that will help you avoid making simple mistakes that could cost you a job offer. The cold simple truth is, an error or simple oversight on a job application or in some step in the process could reasonably appear to be an act of dishonesty. It could appear to be an act of omission of relevant information. It could appear as simple carelessness. It could appear to be any number of things which taken alone could be grounds for dismissal from consideration; and you won’t ever know why you didn’t get a call back. How unfortunate would that be? You could be the right person for the job but one simple mess up or tracking error could spell the difference between an income and an unemployment check.
Timing is another critical aspect. If you’ve been keeping a good record of where you’ve applied and what you’ve supplied, when you receive the callback for an interview, you’ll be ahead of the other candidates under consideration. Familiarity is also critical. I can’t tell you how many times I make the initial contact with someone and upon introducing myself, the person on the other end of the phone, sounding clueless, asks questions that signal he or she is not prepared. There is only one chance to make a first impression and using phrases such as, “Who are you?” and “What does your company do?” just don’t get the job done. Conversely, when someone says something such as, “one moment, I want to retrieve my notes … ah, yes, TriMedx, I applied to a position in Southern California on April 5th. Thank you for calling … ” that person is scoring serious points. That’s a sign of professionalism that indicates I’m likely dealing with someone who’s got his or her act together; most employers tend to like those attributes.
You will also benefit from tracking your inputs. Job seeking is work and it is typically coupled with frustration and limited gratification. You put in a lot of time and it always seems that up until you actually land a job, there is no positive stimulation other than your own thoughts. Those thoughts can also be depressing. But, if you keep an activity log you will always know exactly where you stand on your inputs and efforts and you’ll have at least some idea on the outcomes of your efforts. If you are spinning your wheels and hit a stall (which you will) you will at least have somewhere to go to check on what you’re doing so you can make tweaks as necessary.
Finally, save your database in a place where you can easily retrieve it. I recommend that every time you make updates to it, that you email it to yourself. This way, you will always have the most current version stored and accessible so long as you have access to an Internet connection.