How do you track 20+ job applications without losing track?

Six fields per role: company, title, stage, date applied, the resume you sent, and the next follow-up. FluxResume keeps all six on one Job Tracker card at $0 with unlimited tracking and an unwatermarked PDF. A twenty-column tracker answers no more recruiter-call questions, and nothing sends a follow-up for you.

• The six fields are company, job title, stage, date applied, the resume you sent, and the next follow-up date. Everything past those six is optional.
• Follow-up dates are manual: you set one from list view or the job detail timeline, and due people surface in the Follow Up column of Contacts. No notification goes out.
• No duplicate detection exists. Searching your own board by company name before you click Apply is the check.
• The resume that went out belongs on that job's Resumes tab, which is what makes "which version did they read" a one-second question.
• Editing your master resume later does not change the tailored copy you already submitted, and it is not supposed to.
• Per-role detail that you will never sort or filter by — salary band, portal login, the recruiter's exact phrasing — goes in the job's Notes tab, not a new column.

The board's columns, the Offer Stage and Close Job controls on the job detail status bar, and the Resume Profile scoping that explains most "my job vanished" reports are all covered in Job Tracker is a kanban, not a spreadsheet dump. What a tracker is: what is a job application tracker. This post is about what goes inside a card.

The six fields, and what each one is for​

A field earns a place in the record if you will filter on it, sort by it, or read it aloud during a phone call. That is the whole test, and six fields pass it.

Company and job title are what a recruiter opens with, and what you search when you suspect you have seen this role before. Stage is the one field that tells you what to do next, which is why it is a stage and not a checkbox. Date applied makes silence measurable; without it you cannot tell a two-day wait from a five-week one. The resume you sent matters because if you tailor at all, you now own several versions of your own history, and being asked about a bullet you did not submit is a bad thirty seconds. The next follow-up date is the only forward-looking field in the record, and the reason the list does anything beyond archive.

In FluxResume all six live on the job card in Pipeline. Company, title and stage are on the card face; date applied, the linked resume, and the follow-up date are inside, on the tabs and the timeline.

The fourteen columns that look useful and are not​

People do not add columns for no reason — each one felt necessary at the moment it was added. The problem is that almost none of them get read again.

Recruiter name, hiring manager, referral source: these are people, and people accumulate history. A column holds one name; Contacts holds a name, a title, a company, a LinkedIn URL, a source and a running set of notes, and you can link that person to the job from the card. Salary range, location and remote status are attributes of the posting, and the posting is already linked — copy them in only once you are negotiating, in which case they belong in Notes with the numbers actually discussed. Cover letter status and portfolio sent have real homes too: the job carries Cover Letters and Checklist tabs, and a checklist answers "did I send the work samples" better than a column reading TRUE. Interview dates appear on the Dashboard under Upcoming Interviews. Priority and excitement ratings are enthusiasm you already expressed by applying.

The real cost of the extra fourteen is not storage. It is that a record with twenty fields is a record you stop filling in completely, and a half-filled row is worse than a short complete one, because you can no longer trust it.

How do you stop applying to the same role twice?​

Search your own board by company name before you click Apply. That is the mechanism, and it works because the same posting frequently appears on an aggregator, the company's own site, and a niche board with three different titles — so title matching fails where company matching does not.

The honest part: FluxResume does not detect duplicates for you. There is no warning, no flag, no cross-check against what you have already submitted. The Search jobs... box on the board is the entire defence, and it only helps if the job is on the board, which means logging the application before you close the tab rather than at the end of the week. If you collect roles from several places, which job search websites are worth your time is worth reading first — a shorter list of sources produces fewer accidental doubles than a longer one.

Where does the follow-up date actually live?​

On the job, set by hand. You can add it from list view, which is the sortable table, or from the timeline inside the job detail. In Contacts the same idea applies to people: you set a date, and contacts that are due appear in the Follow Up column.

What does not happen is anything automatic. Nothing emails you, nothing pushes a notification, nothing syncs to your calendar, and no reminder fires seven days after you move a card to Applied. The date is a note to your future self that surfaces in a place you already look. That is genuinely less than the automation several tools advertise, and it is why the daily habit in what an organised job search looks like day to day matters more here than the feature list does.

How long to wait before following up, and what to read into silence, is a separate question with a real answer — see why you are not getting interview callbacks. The first two days after Apply are a tighter loop: what to do in the 48 hours after you apply. The mechanics are just these: the date lives on the job, you set it when you apply, and you act on it when it comes due.

Is a spreadsheet ever enough?​

For a search under about ten applications, yes. A spreadsheet you actually maintain beats a tool you abandoned, and if you are watching one narrow role in one city, the row count never gets high enough for the structure to pay for itself.

The condition that flips it is tailoring. Once you are sending different resumes to different companies, what you need is not more rows — it is the submitted file attached to the record, so the version and the conversation cannot drift apart. A spreadsheet can hold a filename. It cannot hold the file, and resume_final_v3.pdf stops being an answer somewhere around the fifteenth application. That is where a board like https://fluxresume.io/job-tracker/ earns its keep, and where the six fields start paying off, because you are now maintaining them twenty times over.

Common questions​

How many fields should I track per application?​

Six: company, job title, stage, date applied, the resume you sent, and the next follow-up date. Anything else is either already on the linked posting, belongs to a person rather than a job, or is detail you will read once. If you find yourself wanting a seventh column, try it in the job's Notes tab for two weeks first — most candidates for promotion never get read again.

Does FluxResume remind me to follow up?​

No. You set a follow-up date on the job, or on a contact, and due items surface where you already look — the Follow Up column in Contacts, and the follow-up field in the tracker's list view. There is no email, no push notification and no calendar sync. If your search depends on being interrupted at the right moment, put the date in your own calendar as well.

If I fix a typo on my master resume, does the version I already sent change?​

No, and this is deliberate. A tailored resume attached to a job is its own document; editing the master afterwards leaves the submitted copy exactly as it was. Keep one primary resume per Resume Profile and tailor copies per job. It means a fix has to be made twice if you want it in both, and it also means your record of what an employer actually read stays accurate.

Where do recruiter names and phone numbers go?​

In Contacts, not in a column on the job. Contacts stores name, title, company, email, phone, LinkedIn and a source, with filter cards for Recruiters, Hiring Managers, Referrals and Networking, and you can link a person to the job from the card. One recruiter often covers several roles at the same company, which a per-job column handles badly and a contact record handles correctly.

Originally published January 2026. Reviewed and rewritten for FluxResume in August 2026.