As a recent graduate, I have started my journey into the job search. Like many others I knew I needed some type of tracking sheet to see what jobs I had applied to and when in order to follow up with applications and give myself the best chance at landing a position. I quickly found that other software options didn't quite give me the functionality I was looking for so I decided to make my own. I wanted to have to create a table that could be interacted with in any way I wanted to instead of just the basic options. I also wanted to be able to use the job entries for further analytics to also give myself a better insight on what was working in my job hunt as well as places to improve. This also meant that I needed the tracker to be editable at all times, and above all else it needed to be easy and clear to use. Like many other job seekers in the data science/ data analytics field, my job application have been plagued with the almost instant rejection emails from jobs where I meet if not exceed all of their basic and preferred qualifications. While it is extremely frustrating, I did not want to just write these jobs off entirely but I also did not want to include them in my active job search table. With this in mind I created a jupyter notebook that creates a job_search database with two tables Jobs and Rejected_jobs.
The Jobs table and Rejected_jobs tables are very similar by design. As I mentioned I did not want to write off a rejected job entirely but I also did not want it to be a main focus in my job search. This is where the Rejected_jobs table comes in. Once a job entry's status is changed to rejected, the program asks the user to provide the date of the rejection and then will move that job entry from the Jobs table to the Rejected Jobs table. It will also then calculate the days from the application submission date to the date of rejection and if applicable, the number of days from last contact to the date of rejection so that I can also track that number. More work is planned in the future to be able to move a rejected job back to the Jobs table and the ability to edit the entries in the Rejected_jobs table.
The Jobs table is designed to include any and everything a job seeker could need for a successful job application while still keeping the information concise. For each entry the available information you can include ranges from things like skills the job requires that are important for the applicant to highlight, notes about the company, the hiring contact person and their information, the job application url, etc as well as the basic important information like position and company name.
The benefit of creating this program in a jupyter notebook is so that each of the functions are separated in their own cells with explanations for each function. This allows other users to make changes and customizations to their needs easily as every job seeker is different. It also allowed the database to be interactive within the notebook itself. I can edit and view the tables within the notebook. While this Jupyter notebook is the creation and editing of the database and tables, it does not currently have any functions to filter or provide analytics on the data. This again is by my own design as I wanted to keep these things separate and be able to access the database tables in another file to perform analytics but make edits and general view in this notebook.
All in all, I created this notebook to fix some of the shortcomings I found with other programs to track my job search process. I created a notebook that creates a database that will track my active jobs and also keep my rejected jobs. The notebook was designed to be customizable for any users needs and aimed to make the table construction and editing user friendly. The tables include all possible items that make up a successful job application and also provide information that can benefit future analysis.