salesforce job tracker

the problem

students like me always has a problem when school is coming to an end: job hunting. this daunting task requires not just putting the best of ourselves in front of employers, but also a lot of organization. i initially started tracking all my job applications on a google sheets spreadsheet, which was helpful at first, but as needs grew, it became less reliable to me. hence, i've looked to another solution to make that happen to keep me organized.

so what did i do?

well, i found out that anyone with an email could sign up for a salesforce developer account, for free. this means that i was able to create my very own salesforce custom dashboard for my own job application needs.

i started by creating a custom salesforce sales cloud system to allow me to add job applications as "opportunities", and accounts for companies that i've applied with to be tracked.

how does it work?

when i apply for a job, here are the things i log for:

• position name
• company
• location
• source of job posting
• the mode of job (on-site, hybrid, remote)
• the link to the position
• job description
• and date applied to the job posting

this allows me to keep track of the overall picture of the job position, while updating the stage of the job application, ranging from whether if nothing happened after i applied, to getting an interview or a rejection being noted on the file.

you may also be wondering why the job description is also logged - this is just for future reference; whether if the job is relevant to my degree.

with each job application being one row in my database, i can open them and see all the details about the job.

in this page, i would be able to view its history on when i've applied, and when i've heard back from them. i can also view the job description of that posting, even when the employer has already taken the application page down. this is extremely useful when needing details from the job description after hire.

results

this was and is an interesting experimental use case for salesforce, as i was able to be hands on with the system itself and was able to understand how salesforce can be used. with this use case, learning about salesforce, has gained me a skill in using a CRM (customer resource management) software. you may still be confused as to why this even (kinda) works in the first place: think of me trying to sell myself as the product, as a service, to employers to hire. when that relationship exists, it makes a perfect case where the employers i've applied to are potential customers.