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A job search decays into a spreadsheet nobody updates, because logging feels like admin. The way to stop that is to make logging a side effect of talking about what happened, which is exactly what a conversation is good at.

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Capturing something new

Here’s a job — track it. https://boards.greenhouse.io/…
capture_job_posting fetches the page server-side, reads the structured posting data most job boards publish, and creates the application in one move: company matched or created with its own website — which puts the logo on your board — role title, full description, location, compensation and source, starting on the wishlist. Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday and LinkedIn links all work. When a page does not state the employer or the role readably it creates nothing and hands back whatever it did parse, so you can fill in the missing pieces. An employer guessed from a URL is worse than one you were asked about. If you already applied, say so and it moves the stage.

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By hand, or from nothing

I applied to Helios for a staff engineer role yesterday. Here’s the posting: …
Only company and role title are required. Paste the whole posting into the description — it is what a resume gets tailored against later, and postings vanish from the web the moment a role is filled. A listing is optional. A role you are chasing through a LinkedIn DM is still an application: track it with company and title, put Cold outreach in the sources, and attach the person you messaged as a contact.
Do not set a follow-up date unless you want a specific one. They set themselves from the stage.

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Logging what happened

Everything that happens with a company goes on the application’s timeline:
Had a call with the Helios recruiter. Team is six people, they want someone to own billing end to end. She’s sending me the loop this week.
Write it the way you said it. “Recruiter said the team is six people and they want someone to own billing end to end” is worth far more in three months than “had a call” — and it is what lets a follow-up message refer to something real, which is what gets a follow-up answered. Twelve activity types are available; the ones that come up are CALL, INTERVIEW, EMAIL_SENT, EMAIL_RECEIVED, NOTE, and OUTREACH for a message you sent first.

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Moving stages

Helios moved me to the final round.
move_application_stage writes its own timeline entry and resets the follow-up date, so it is one call. Do not also log the change by hand. Closing several at once is one call too: “close out everything I never heard back from” moves a batch to GHOSTED, each with its own timeline entry and its own follow-up reset, so the funnel history stays intact.
Silence is GHOSTED, not REJECTED. A rejection is a decision against you; a ghosting is a non-response. Filing one as the other makes diagnose_search give you the wrong advice about what to fix.

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People

If a person comes up — a recruiter, a hiring manager, whoever referred you — say their name and it becomes a contact attached to that application and that company. Names disappear fast, and they are the thing that matters most later. Things that happened with a person rather than on an application go on their own timeline: a coffee, a call, a reply. That is what makes “when did I last talk to them?” answerable.

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Chasing

What is due now

What do I need to chase this week?
Returns two lists — applications whose follow-up date has arrived, and people whose ping date has. Both are work; plan a day from the pair.

What the week looks like

What does next week look like?
Merges follow-ups, task deadlines and logged activity into one window, sorted earliest first.
When something is overdue, do not just report it — draft the actual message, using the timeline so it refers to what was said. Ask for that:
Draft the follow-ups for anything overdue, using what was actually said on each one.

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Views worth keeping

The pipeline toolbar switches between a drag-and-drop board, a sortable table and a month calendar, filters by stage — several at once — and searches. A cut you keep returning to gets saved under a name:
Save this as “Gone quiet”.
Saved views are readable by an assistant too, so referring to one by name in conversation works: reading a view tells it what you consider one job.

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Sharing the board

Give me a link to share my pipeline with my coach.
A read-only page showing company, role, stage, location, waiting time and follow-up dates — and never your notes, job descriptions, salary, contacts or timeline. Asking twice returns the same link. Revoking destroys the address rather than pausing it.

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The three things not to do

Check the timeline first. A duplicate entry makes the record harder to read and skews “what moved this week”.
An interview being scheduled is not an interview happening. The stage is where the application actually is, and diagnose_search reads it literally.
Applications create their company automatically. create_company is for somewhere you are researching before there is an application.

The weekly review

Once a week, ask what is actually going wrong rather than what the counts are.