Applying for jobs < Optimizing applying for jobs

TL;DR Built a tracker so I could stop wasting time… then spent several evenings adding feature after feature to the tracker. 10/10 would procrastinate again.

With the job market being what it is today, I see a lot of people applying for a lot of jobs. Like a lot. I've seen spreadsheets and heard about people applying to 100+ jobs a week. But being that organized is a pain.

I was tracking the jobs I applied for in Notion. That worked ok, but saving jobs and manually adding all of the metadata for each job felt so repetitive. AI to the rescue?

Don't start another vibe coding project, don't–well, I did.

Shipped

• Kanban board – Saved → Applied → Interview → Offer
• Drag & drop – @hello-pangea/dnd
• AI parsing form – paste the full job ad, hit “Parse,” fields auto‑populate via Gemini
• Import/Export – Only localStorage, JSON in/out
• Stats – applications per month, time-to-interview, success rates
• Dark-light mode – follows system preference
• Delight – mark a card “Signed” → confetti → “Job hunt wrapped” summary

The project is live on Vercel -> job-tracker.vercel.app
Heads‑up – it runs on my free Gemini key, so expect occasional rate‑limit hiccups

Process

I like to start off with v0, a good way to get the UI in place and get a feel for the project. I wanted to just see if I could scrape the jobs I've applied to from my LinkedIn profile.

Tried and failed.

After a few prompts back and forth figuring out a solution, using just the Linkedin url wasn't enough. So what I ended up doing was adding Gemini to the mix and just ⌘A → ⌘C → ⌘V, having AI + regex parse the whole job listing page.

Now that I could save jobs easily, I started to think about how to display them. I wanted to be able to see the status of each job and the progress I've made. So I added a kanban board to the project and stats. For each job I also added AI insights, notes, states, and logs.

A win state

When you finally get that offer, and sign it. Bam, confetti 🎊–and a "Spotify wrapped", but for your job hunt (I really liked the Raycast version wrapped, reddit posts for more info). How long did you actually spend applying for jobs? How many rejections 🫠?

What's next?

Applying for jobs 🫡. But would love to add a db and auth. Smooth out the UI. A share button - to share that you got the job, or that you're still applying nine months in.