An excell-ent way to track your job hunting performance

Track your Performance

A person far smarter than me called Peter Drucker once said “What gets measured, gets managed” and when it comes to your job-hunting you need to have something to track and manage.

Having something to track will give you something to aim towards. There are a number of things to track when job-hunting. Here are three things to track:

Jobs applied for.
Interviews attended.
Job application to interview ratio.

These three Key Performance Indicators are the only things that will track your path to success and hopefully a job.

When job-hunting, you can only control the number of jobs that you apply for. Interviews and job offers that flow from these interviews are only possible through job applications. Job applications are the only part of a job hunt you have real and total control over.

Depending on your situation, you need to set a certain number of applications each week and work toward this number either each day or each week. This number, if consistently applied and you hit your target week in, week out, will pay dividends further down the line.

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Use spreadsheets.

My better half says I am obsessed with spreadsheets. I deny this charge; I am not obsessed with spreadsheets even, if I wrote this book via a spreadsheet and have a spreadsheet that tracks all my spreadsheets.

Anyway, back to the spreadsheets and not my excel-lent addiction.

A spreadsheet is a secret weapon during a job search. After much time wasted, I shall now explain why.

With a spreadsheet, you have the perfect tool to ensure that you are keeping on top of your applications, you can track those that are successful and those that are not. It will also help you to batch tasks, save applications for the future and will allow you to keep a place for all your jobs to do. It is a place to store information that you are likely to forget and keep your search organised.

So what do you need to include in your spreadsheet to help you in your job search?

Personally, I favour Google Sheets (https://www.google.com/sheets/about/) as it is free and is cloud-based so you will be able to access it on the go, across a number of different devices and is easily accessible.

When you create the spreadsheet, open up two tabs in the sheet. Call one “ Job applications” and the others “Tasks to do.”

In the job application tab, you will store information about the jobs you have applied for and the jobs that you are going to apply for. In the ‘tasks to do’ section, this is the place that you will include specific tasks for the next day, or week.

Now that you have created the spreadsheet and the tabs, now you have to populate it with data. You need to record the following information on the job application sheet.

Date added - Job title - Employer - Link to job advert - Status - Notes.

In the date added section you include the date the information was added to the spreadsheet.

In the job title section, you include the information on the Job title of the role of the position.

In the employer, section put the name of the employer, e.g. Joe Blogs MP or The Public Affairs Superstore.

In the link, column add the web address for the job you are applying for so you can easily visit it again.

In the status, the section includes either Awaiting application, Applied, Rejected, Interviewed. This will help you with the tracking and measurement of your job-hunting.

In the notes, this is a place to put any other information that you need to deal with, or might find useful.

In the task tab, you will not need much, just three columns.

The first column is the task, e.g. do research for Joanna Bloggs MP interview.

The section column includes notes, e.g. review the job description.

The third column adds the header status, and include Outstanding, Finished, In-progress.

Once you have done this, you can now start populating it with all the brilliant jobs you want to apply for.

However, just one more hint before we move on. Make sure on the top line that you add filters as it will help you to see the wood for the trees and only access what is needed, when you need it.

When looking for a job in politics, there are a variety of websites that are really useful, god-tier useful even, a few others that are helpful and a range of others that can be helpful but not very useful.

We will explore the best places to find political jobs in a subsequent chapter. Now back to my spreadsheets.**taps on keyboard** *tap* *tap*

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Thank you for reading this article. This is an extract from the book Political Careers: The secret and confidential guide to finding, applying and getting a job in British politics. The book is available on Amazon in Ebook and Paperback formats.

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