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Use Notion to organize your job search

Notion is a phenomenal productivity tool - I came across it a year ago when looking for a better way of project managing my own business. I was looking for a tool that could do a few things: Handle documents, spreadsheets, and visualize important information.

Today, I’m going to show you how you can organize your job search in Notion.

First, what is Notion?

Notion is a digital workspace that gives you the freedom to create, plan, and organize your work and ideas. Think of it as a super notebook. It allows you to jot down thoughts, create to-do lists, tables, and calendars, and even work on projects with others. It's like having a personal assistant, organizer, and brainstorming pad all rolled into one app.

Why use it for job search?

Because it makes your life easier. Once you learn the basics (and the learning curve is not steep at all), you’ll thank me.

How can you use it to organize your job search process?

Because this tool is so versatile, there are a lot of different ways you can use it. For example, you can use it to record job applications, keep a rolodex of important contacts (like recruiters) or companies, visualize your application pipeline, and even create a task manager to remind you of important to-dos.

To illustrate this, I’ve created a simple job search tracker in Notion, which I’ll share with you at the end of this newsletter.

In my tracker, which I creatively named ‘Job Search Tracker’, this is the Home Screen. It’s a table view of all of your applications. Similar to a regular old spreadsheet, each column represents a property (like the name of the job, the company, a link to the job page, or the contact person). Pretty straight forward stuff.

But what if you want to view your applications a different way, say by their status. Well in the next view, you can. Now you get a clear picture of where your applications are in the pipeline (i.e., applied, rejected, interviewed etc.) in a kanban board view.

If you want to see the days you’ve applied (or the days you’ve got interviews scheduled) in a traditional calendar view, you can do that too, all in the same tool, with just a couple clicks. Zero coding knowledge or technical skills required.

But there’s something cool I haven’t showed you yet. Remember how I told you that Notion acts as a notes app, calendar, spreadsheet, AND documents app?

Here’s an example of that in action 👇

Each entry in your table can be turned into its own page. Simply hover your mouse near an entry in the table view, click Open, and a whole new sub-page will appear, which you can then use as you would any document.

You can use this page to jot down any notes about the job, such as a job description or key points you take during a phone screen with the recruiter.

That’s just one simple way to use Notion as a job seeker. If you’re the tinkering type, you can build something much more complicated than this (I run my company with it).

If you want a copy of this job search tracker, access it here.

Twitter Takes (and one from LinkedIn)

Questions & Comments

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