Using Involve Resume

The Application Tracker in Full: States, Records and Export

The ten stages a job can sit in, what a card actually records, the chase thresholds and where they come from, and the twenty-seven column Excel export.

The tracker exists to replace a spreadsheet, so the test it has to pass is whether everything that was in the spreadsheet fits. That includes the jobs applied for somewhere else entirely, because nobody's search happens inside one product.

This post is the full contents: the states, what a row holds, what the screen computes from it, and what comes out of the export.

The ten stages

The kind column is not decoration. It decides what the arithmetic may count. A row in the before kind has not been sent, so it can never count towards a response rate. A closed row is finished, so it must never be chased. Getting that wrong is how a board ends up nagging somebody about a job they were rejected from in March.

Acknowledged sits between applied and screening for the same reason. A receipt confirmation is sent by the software before anybody has read anything, so counting it as a response would produce a number about the employer's software rather than about your search.

Three ways to read the same board

The view is remembered per browser, because it is a reading habit rather than a per-visit decision.

• Columns. One column per stage, cards dragged between them. The right shape while a search is live.
• Cards. A single flow. Better past about forty rows, where nobody scrolls five columns to find one company.
• List. A sortable table, which is the thing people actually open a spreadsheet for.

Closed columns are hidden unless you tick to show them, or unless something is in one.

What a card records

More than a status. Each row carries:

• The role, linked to the posting where there is one, and the company and location.
• The match score, where a score was ever computed for it.
• Which document was sent. On a row from Involve that is the file that was attached; on a row you typed in yourself it is whatever you wrote.
• Where it came from: through Involve, imported, or added by you.
• The date you applied, the deadline, the salary as written, the employment type, and a contact.
• Chips for the resume, the cover letter, the portfolio and the notes. A document that exists is a link into the screen that made it. A document that does not is a link to the screen that would make it, except on rows where there is no screen of ours to open, because a chip that lied about that would be worse than no chip.
• A note, and the chase line when one applies.

The stage is a dropdown on the card itself, and there is a delete on every row.

Where the same job arrives from both directions, once from us and once from your own list, the two become one card at the further-along stage, and a banner at the top of the screen names which ones were combined.

What the screen computes

Five counters across the top:

A rate over zero applications is shown as a dash rather than as zero. Zero would be a claim; no denominator is not the same fact.

The chase thresholds, and where they come from

The numbers are from published research on how long employers actually take, and each one is cited in the source at the point it is defined.

No row is moved automatically at any of these. The board offers, and you decide what your own search looks like. The chase panel lists up to eight rows with the reason and the suggested action, and the same line appears on the card itself.

Adding a job applied for anywhere

The form takes a link on its own. A role, a company, or a link: one of the three is enough. Everything else is optional: stage, date applied, deadline, location, type of job, salary as written in whatever currency, which resume you sent, a contact email or profile link, and a note.

The company is read off the applicant tracking host where the host says it plainly, and left blank rather than guessed at where it does not.

Importing what you already keep

Import takes .xlsx or .csv. The file is read and your board stays the same until you say so: you are told how many roles it holds that the board can read, how many rows it cannot and why, and how many rows you currently have.

Then two buttons. Add keeps everything already there and puts these after it. Replace clears the rows you added or imported and leaves only this file. Anything applied for through Involve survives either way, because that is the record of what was actually sent.

Column headers are matched through an alias table, so the spellings from common tracker templates are understood without renaming anything first. Stage words are matched the same way, including the ones people actually type: interviewed, first interview, round 2, final.

The export

Two buttons, one table. The Excel file and the CSV carry the same twenty-seven columns in the same order, with the same neutralisation rule, and a test compares the two header rows so that export cannot quietly start meaning two things.

The columns: Company, Role, Stage, Applied On, Deadline, Job Type, Salary, Salary Amount, Salary Currency, Location, URL, Source, Updated, Next Action, Next Action Date, Contact Name, Contact Email, Contact Link, Contact Role, Resume, Cover Letter, Portfolio, Notes Link, Match Score, Tags, Notes, ID.

The headers are the words a person would put at the top of a spreadsheet rather than our field names, because this file is opened in Excel far more often than it is read by us, and because the import maps headers through the same aliases either way. So a file exported from here imports back into here without an edit.

Two columns are written as real numbers rather than text, so a spreadsheet can sort and total them: the salary amount and the match score.

One detail that is invisible until it matters. Spreadsheet applications treat a cell beginning with an equals sign, a plus, a minus or an at sign as a formula, and a formula in an exported file is a way to run something on the machine that opens it. Every such cell is prefixed with an apostrophe on the way out.

What it is for after forty applications

Three things stop fitting in your head somewhere around fifteen, and by forty they are gone.

1. Which version of your CV a given employer is holding. The document reference on the row answers it in one glance, which is the question you have when somebody calls back.
2. What is genuinely silent versus what you only feel is silent. The threshold panel is the difference between chasing on day three and chasing on day eight.
3. Where your effort actually went. Sort the export by country or by month and the answer is usually not the one you would have given from memory.

Open the tracker, add the last five applications you sent, and export it once to see the shape of the file. Both of those take ten minutes and neither has to be repeated.