I had the misfortune, like many others recently, of being laid off from work, so I have embarked upon everyone's favorite time waster, hunting for a new job. I wanted to set up a format that would allow my to track and manage my job search using Obsidian as my hub. This serves a few purposes for me.
- Captures the list of companies that I applied to
- Enables me to track the metrics of my job hunt
- Allows me to see what roles I have "in flight" vs. applied vs. declined
- Centralizes all notes about a given role, the posting at the time of application, and allows me to keep track of who I spoke to.
I haven't seen any other examples for this workflow, so was hoping that I could get some suggestions for improvements/enhancements that would improve it. It may be overkill for some, but for me, as I am managing my network, quite a few different roles, and multiple in-flight interviews, I wanted to make sure I wasn't dropping the ball.
How it works:
I start with a 'Job Post Template' that I use for any role that I want to apply for. I title it 'Company Name - Role' and the template uses the #JobPost tag. That tag is used by 'Auto Note Mover' to place all roles into a single fold to keep things tidy.
Within the template, I have the following front matter elements defined:
- Company - Name of the company (I use this across my people profiles as well)
- Type - This is used across many of my notes. For these notes it's 'Job Post'
- Role - Job role title. Used later on.
- Applied - this is a binary field
- date_applied - date field to capture when I apply to a role
- recruiter_screen - binary field denoting if I get selected to be screened by the recruiter
- interview - binary field denoting kicking off the formal interview process
- rejection - binary field that I use to define if I receive a rejection
- declined - binary field that I use if I decline the role or remove myself from consideration
- joburl - empty string field that I place the job posting URL.
Within the body of the template my only area is "Job Text" where I dump the job text from the listing for easy access.
Typically, I will only do minimal formatting on the role text until I have a recruiter screen scheduled. At that point, I'll clean it up, highlight key terms, run the role through GPT to pull out the top-10 skills, etc. Pretty much do whatever I need to do to wrap my head around how my background applies to the role and where I may have issues answering questions or need to think of stories that apply to the types of work that will be requested.
Job Hunt Tracker
The summary of all this information is in a note titled 'Job Hunt Tracker', which has the following sections:
- To-Do
- To Apply
- In-Flight
- Jobs Applied For
- Rejections/Declined
- Closed Tasks
To-Do - Simple list of tasks using the 'Tasks' plugin. I denote all tasks related to my job hunt with the #JobHunt tag.
For any code, note that you need to include the triple ticks before the operator to enable Obsidian to see the code ( ``` )
tasks
tags includes #JobHunt
not done
To Apply - This is a list of any role that I created a page for but never applied. This was more applicable at the start of my hunt, when I went around and collected a bunch of roles that I was interested in before I was applying. Not that I am a few weeks into my search, if I find a role, I apply, so it's mostly empty unless there is a role that requires a specific adjustment to my resume.
Note - I recognize that I should be adjusting each and every resume to match the job description, and I likely will, but I just started my job hunt and it was more important to saturate the current open roles to establish a base application pipeline than it was to toil away at each and every role to get the resume to match.
dataview
table
company as "Company",
role as "Role"
from "Personal/Job Hunt/Companies"
where contains(file.tags, "#JobPost")
and applied = false
sort "date applied" desc `
In Flight - This is the table that shows me any role where I have been moved forward in the process but have not been declined. These are what I consider 'active' applications. I should probably add another bit of front-matter to my notes that lists the 'next action date' and sort by that. Would likely make it more actionable. I've yet to have more than a handful of these, so it's not been an issue to this point.
dataview
table
company as "Company",
role as "Role"
from "Personal/Job Hunt/Companies"
where contains(file.tags, "#JobPost")
and applied = false
sort "date applied" desc `
Jobs Applied For - This is the core to my job search. It allows me to see any roles that I've applied for so that I don't apply to the same role twice and have a list of jobs that I've applied for across a company. This matters for roles at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Walmart, etc. where because the organizations are so large, it's possible to find multiple roles that suit my experience.
dataview
table
company as "Company",
role as "Role",
recruiter_screen as "Phone Screen",
interview as "Interview",
rejection as "Rejected",
dateformat(date_applied, "MM-dd-yyyy") as "Date Applied"
from "Personal/Job Hunt/Companies"
where contains(file.tags, "#JobPost")
and applied = true
and rejection = false
sort date_applied desc
Rejections/Declined - This captures all the roles that I consider to be closed. It's more for record keeping than anything else.
dataview
table
company as "Company",
role as "Role",
recruiter_screen as "Phone Screen",
interview as "Interview",
rejection as "Rejected",
declined as "Declined",
dateformat(date_applied, "MM-dd-yyyy") as "Date Applied"
from "Personal/Job Hunt/Companies"
where contains(file.tags, "#JobPost")
and applied = true
and rejection = true
or declined = true
sort date_applied desc
Tasks Completed - More record keeping of all the tasks that I've completed related to the Job Hunt.
tasks
tags includes #JobHunt
done
Overall, my process isn't all that complicated, but I don't feel the need to over complicate it. When I do get a recruiter screen, I put all of my notes for the screen directly within the Job Application note, so it all stays together. I will create an individual people profile for every person that I speak to within a company. In that profile, I'll write quick notes about who they are, their role, when I spoke to them and I will link it back to the job post note.
If I do make a custom resume or cover letter for a specific role, I will dump that into the Job Post note, as well as any notes that I generate using GPT to review the posting or prep for speaking to a recruiter.
I just started this process 2 weeks ago, so it's still pretty fresh and I'd love to hear others feedback. Eventually I'll create a metrics summary page to visualize my application cadence, flow and overall statistics around the search. Given what I am already seeing, it'll be greatly demoralizing :)