Listings

The stage before applications. Every posting you notice — captured from a page or typed in — waits here until you decide what to do with it.

Where things come from

• Capture a posting. Paste an address, or the page itself, and Postulo reads it. What it read appears at the top of the Listings page as a capture waiting for review; review it, correct anything the parser got wrong, and it becomes a listing. See Capturing postings.
• Add a listing. Type it. The company and the title are enough to start — a listing can be thin, an application cannot — and the rest can be filled in later.

Both land in the same place, marked New.

Deciding

Each listing has three doors:

• Shortlist — worth coming back to. It stays in the to-decide list, flagged.
• Discard — not this one. You can say why (not for me, the pay, the location, closed, other), and the reason is kept: what you passed on, and why, is part of the record. A discarded listing can be restored.
• Apply — the decision that matters. This records the application — status, how you applied, priority, your own deadline, tags — and the timeline begins. The listing leaves the to-decide list and shows as Applied from then on.

Two states are never set by hand, because they follow from other facts: Applied, once an application exists, and Closed, once the opening is gone or its closing date has passed.

Deciding about several at once

Most listings are discarded, and doing that one at a time is the wrong shape for the work. Tick the rows you have made up your mind about and the bar under the table applies one decision to all of them: shortlist them, discard them, or put them back.

Discard asks for its reason once and gives it to every ticked row. That is a fair description of a sweep — you are turning these down for the same reason — and a row that really went for another can be discarded again from its own buttons, which replaces the reason. There is no bulk delete: every action here is undone by another one, and deleting forty postings is not.

Ticks last as long as the page. Changing a filter loads a fresh one and clears them.

The filters

Two controls, and they are deliberately different.

The tabs choose which listings you are looking at. To decide is the default: new and shortlisted listings that are still open. Shortlisted, Discarded, Applied, Closed and Everything are one click away, each with its count. Three of those are not stored anywhere — Applied is read from your applications, Closed from the dates — which is why they are a strip of tabs rather than a column you could filter on.

The header row narrows within whatever the tabs left. Type into it and the table narrows as you type: the role, the company, the location, where you found it, the working arrangement, when it closes. On a phone the row becomes a Narrow panel holding the same fields. The two compose, so discarded, in Berlin is one address you can keep.

Arranging the table

Listings are a table like Applications and Companies, so everything those get, this gets.

• Sort by any column. A click sorts one way, a second the other, a third goes back to the table's own order. The salary column brings hourly, daily and monthly figures to a year before comparing them, within a currency.
• The state column sorts by what it says. An applied listing still stores new underneath, so the column orders by the word in the cell rather than by the stored value.
• Choose the columns, and their order. Fifteen are available and five show by default; the rest — when you noted it, where you found it, the salary, why you discarded it, the address, the description — are under Columns, along with how many rows a page holds. The choice follows your account rather than the browser.
• Drag a column's edge to set its width, which is also kept on your account.
• Rename a role where it sits with the pencil beside it; the role itself opens the posting.

The buttons that decide about a row are not one of the columns and cannot be hidden.

At zero listings none of this appears: an empty page with a Columns menu and a filter row over nothing is worse than a sentence saying what to do next.

Closing dates

A listing with a closing date is ordered by it to begin with — soonest first, the ones with no date last — and the dashboard says how many close this week.

Already applied?

Recording after the fact is the common case. Two shortcuts keep it a single step:

• When reviewing a capture, tick I have already applied to this one and the listing becomes an application straight away.
• Record an application, on the dashboard and the Applications page, is the one-form path: it creates the listing and the application together. Underneath it is exactly those two steps, so the record is the same whichever door you used.

Say when you applied. Every one of those forms — intake, Apply, capture review, and the API's applied_on — has an Applied on date. Left empty it is today. Fill it in when you are writing down something you sent last week, because it is the date everything else is measured from: reply and interview times, the sources and industries you applied through, the by-month figures, and the evidence list in the report for an employment office.

You do not have to start at Applied either. Recording a reply you already have — setting the status straight to Interviewing, or to Rejected — counts as applied on the date you give, because it plainly went out. The one status that does not is Withdrawn straight from a draft: that is something never sent. Withdrawing an application you did send keeps its date.

What Insights makes of it

Insights reports how many listings you noticed, how many you applied to, and how many you discarded — your selectivity, and the first number that says whether the postings you find are the postings you want.