Insights

The dashboard, arranged by pressing Arrange on it.

What the record adds up to: how far applications get, how many are answered at all, how long employers take, and which sources actually produce something.

Insights is not a separate page any more. It answered the same question the dashboard did — how is this going? — at a different distance, and you had to remember which page held which number. Everything described below is now a widget you can put on the dashboard, in the order you want. Nothing is gone; the old address still leads there.

These widgets are off by default, because a response funnel means nothing to somebody with three applications. Press Arrange on the dashboard and add the ones you want.

Read from the timeline, not from statuses

This is the distinction that makes the page worth having.

An application that reached an interview and was then rejected has a current status of rejected. Counting current statuses would report that you have had no interviews — which is both wrong and, after a long search, quietly demoralising.

Every figure here comes from the event log instead. A stage counts applications that ever reached it, whatever happened afterwards. Three final-round rejections show as three interviews, because that is what they were.

How far things got

A funnel from Applied down to Offer. Each row shows how many applications ever reached that stage and what share of everything you sent that represents.

Read it for the shape rather than the numbers. A funnel that narrows sharply between Applied and Acknowledged says something different from one that narrows between Interviewing and Offer — the first is a problem with how applications are being sent, the second is a problem with what happens once you are in the room.

Got any reply

The share of applications that produced any answer.

A rejection counts as a reply. Being turned down is information, and an employer who says no has behaved better than one who says nothing. Only silence counts against the figure, which is why Ghosted is a status in its own right.

How long they take

The median number of days between applying and the first sign of life, with the fastest and slowest alongside it.

Median rather than average, deliberately: one employer who answers after four months would drag an average somewhere no real employer sits. The median tells you what to expect; the slowest tells you what is possible.

Applications still waiting are counted separately. They have no reply time yet, and treating them as instant or as infinite would both be wrong.

Interviews

The median number of days between applying and the first interview, how many applications reached one, and what is in the diary. Read from the timeline's interview entries — an interview typed in by hand counts as much as one settled from the diary — and the kinds of interview held are tallied from the diary itself.

Where they came from

A table comparing sources: how many you sent, how many were answered, how many reached an interview, how many produced an offer.

A Quiet column counts the applications from each source that are still live but have gone quiet — silent past your threshold, with nothing planned. They are not failures yet, but they are not replies either, and a source whose applications mostly go quiet is telling you something the response rate has not caught up with. Beneath the table, the companies where applications have gone quiet are named.

This is the figure most likely to change what you do, and it depends entirely on filling in found via when you record a posting. Everything without one is grouped as Not recorded, which is honest but not useful. Two minutes of discipline here is worth more than the rest of the page.

By industry

The same table again, by the industries you gave each company. A company in several industries counts under each of them, which is the honest reading; applications at companies with no industry sit under Not recorded.

Small numbers

A job search produces dozens of applications, not thousands. Below five, Postulo says so rather than quietly presenting a percentage that is really one story with a decimal point attached.

Even above five, treat these as a record of what happened rather than as a rate that predicts anything. Nine applications and one interview is not an eleven per cent interview rate; it is one interview.

Choosing which of these to see

Arrange, on the dashboard, puts the page itself into an editing mode: every widget stays where it is and grows its controls, and the ones not shown are listed below the grid, each with a sentence saying what it is for. The ones described on this page sit under What the record says; the ones about today — gone quiet, interviews coming up, reminders due — sit under What needs doing. Done takes you back to the page as it reads. The mode is a moment rather than a setting: it lives in the address, so a reload keeps it and the back button leaves it.

Add, remove and move with buttons. You can also drag a widget into place with a mouse, but the buttons are the real control: drag and drop does not fire on a touch screen and cannot be reached from a keyboard, so in Postulo it is always an addition to a control that works everywhere, never a replacement for one. Dragging a widget onto another one puts it where that one was, and saves exactly what the arrows save — it is the same arrangement, reached a different way. With scripts blocked nothing looks draggable, because a control that does nothing is worse than no control.

Four arrows, because the dashboard is two-dimensional. Widgets have widths and fill rows in order, so:

• left and right move a widget one place — swapping it with its neighbour;
• up and down move it a whole row, past everything sharing the row above or below.

On a narrow screen there is one column and the two axes are the same move. An arrow that cannot go anywhere is shown but disabled, so the cluster keeps its shape and the arrow you reach for is where it was last time. After a move, the page comes back with the focus on the widget you moved and a line saying which row and place it landed in.

The grid it lands on

Four columns on a wide screen. Every widget declares how much room it needs to be legible — a quarter of the row, a half, or the whole of it — and four is the count in which those three words mean what they say. Five columns has no half.

A widget has a width and a place in the order; the row it lands on falls out of the two. There is nothing else to set, which is why there is no way to leave a hole in the middle of the page, put two widgets in the same cell, or end up with an arrangement that has to be repaired. When a plugin is uninstalled and its widget goes, the rest close up.

The widths are not yours to choose. A width is the widget's own statement about how much room it needs — a funnel with six stages is unreadable in a quarter of a row — and what you arrange is the order.

On a narrow screen there is one column, read downwards in the order you arranged.

The arrangement is yours from the day your account exists. It starts as the standard one — the same seven widgets everybody starts with, computed against your own records and nobody else's — and it is stored against your account rather than worked out afresh each time. Back to the standard arrangement gives you that starting page back.

Nothing ever arrives on it without being asked. A widget added in a later release, or brought by a plugin somebody installed, waits under New since you last arranged this with two buttons: add it, or say no. Saying no is remembered, so it is not offered again. Until you have answered, the dashboard itself says what is waiting.

That is a deliberate change from how this used to work. A new widget used to appear by itself on a dashboard nobody had arranged, which meant an upgrade could change your page without asking; and it could never have worked for a widget that arrived with a plugin rather than with a release.

A period, rather than everything

Everything on this page is computed across your whole record: it can say what your response rate is, and not what happened in March. For a period — a month, a quarter, the last few weeks — with the cadence at the top and every application listed underneath, ready to hand to an employment office as a PDF, see Reports.

Exporting

Export everything takes you to a complete copy of your data — see Backups and your data.