Third party recruiters are the number one pain of the process. They don't respect candidates; they don't want to hear about your goals or your search constraints; they just aggressively talk over you. And I'm even talking about the so-called 'good' recruiters that you get referred to by word of mouth. Even they will break your heart.
The second pain point is well known: everyone uses different online application portals, and everyone has different requirements for manual data entry. I would have expected by now that applying at any company is as simple as just uploading a resume and clicking through some boilerplate agreements or ethnicity surveys that we would all be wise enough to always opt-out of. But I'm still dealing with application sites that look like they were built in 1995 and require upwards of 30 minutes of manual data entry.
Apps that could alleviate the pain of these issues would be way more valuable than organizational apps. The pain of the disorganization is just not that meaningful.
After sending out about a hundred applications, I found I had no control over the process, so there was no reason to track it. Instead, I spent that time working on my own projects and going to meetups to find out about live job openings and show off my stuff. The job application system at most places is badly broken and HR and recruiters don't seem to know or care enough to fix it, so it's better to circumvent through some kind of personal connection.
If you're planning on writing something like this, perhaps a tool for the flip side would be better, i.e. an applicant tracker for organisations (although these do already exist).
Any time I have a day where there's just nothing good to apply to, or I don't hear back from anyone, I just tune it all out and write some code and it helps me feel much better.
1) No standardized resume format that all job portals parse the same.
2) Inconsistent resume parsing and form filling meaning it's faster to do things by hand than upload a resume and edit.
A great place to start would be fixing this on the Job Portal side by creating and publishing a standard resume format that all of them can parse easily. If that means dumping my resume to a standardized XML format, I'll do it. I'm tired of wasting 20-30 minutes of my life filling out forms for one job because their resume parser can't tell me what they're looking for.
Having applied for a wide variety of jobs, I've noticed most of the non-major tech companies are using standard portals like Jobvite or Taleo to handle their application process. I think it'd be possible to upend this market by advertising you make it easier for candidates to apply which increases the likelihood of the company gets more qualified candidates. With the standardized resume format, you can increase filtering on the backend to help recruiters zero in on people they want to talk to increasing chances of getting a hit and finding the right candidate. Win-Win.
I think you should focus on whatever takes out most of the effort of this process and for that an email would be the best solution: send me an email that is targeted to me and with jobs I can actually apply for.
The biggest pain for me is not doing applications, it's doing applications for jobs where I have no idea if: 1. I have good chances; 2. have been closed already (lots of those out there; 3. have the pay I am looking for.
The pain you're describing is being handled by at least 10 companies that I know and which sent me updates about the jobs. Granted they're not the best, but they work.
The pain I wanted to reduce was the pain that comes with the entire process. When you're simultaneously in 10+ process it can become easy to lose your focus and forget to follow up, read notes, to dos (google most recent interviews etc).
The pain I also wanted to remove was the pain of re-applying to companies that are god awful at providing feedback, that do not reply, that forget to close job ads etc. Think job app history.
Another pain I wanted to remove was weighing the offers via charts and summaries on the offer page and show communication and interest from the company on the reports page.
Another idea as suggested in comments: Provide this data transparently, blind the important information and that might take the product to a whole new level.
I do not want this to be another job board or an email newsletter. There are plenty out there.
I think the problem is that while most of us have college degrees which at least give us a foot in the door, there is very little differentiation to an employer from a graduate of Waterloo or Carnegie Mellon. You might assume they're good but you don't know. They aren't vested by the companies you trust to have quality screening processeses.
The problem might be getting companies to willingly disclose their information. Then again, I went to a co-op school so by the time I graduated I already had nearly a year of work experience, and very little trouble with each additional notch on my belt. Maybe there is a way to solve this that isn't necessarily a product or service.
I would consider reading the comments again, it seems like a lot more people are wanting a way to quickly fill out a variety of similar but non-standard forms than want either a job board or a job app tracker.
However, there is something fundamentally different - they're just an assistant and automatic job applier, converting to pdfs, creating cover letters etc. I wouldn't offer that. I'd aim this initially to only tech-savvy people like developers, engineers - you get the picture. I'm sure they don't need help with converting to pdf and formatting. They don't need help with applying. They do however need a way to track their application progress, as I have applied to a couple of companies 10+ and at times it was tedious to track all of them.
I meant something more like an actual job process tracking tool and a data tool for your own use.
You apply for a job - tracked progress - landed the job. You landed couple actually. You go to the offer page and compare the benefits at a glance via graphs, summary's etc.
Lets say you searched for a job, you've sent 30+ applications, logged the process etc. You got hired (woohoo). Something doesn't work out after 6 months or after 2,3 years you start feeling burnt out and want to move on. You look back and see where you applied, how was the process, email the recruiter etc. You see they didn't reply while you had the necessary qualifications and they didn't provide you with a great feedback. You consult google and the tool which might have public database by now that is huge - realizing they didn't change. You don't waste time.
I did find it difficult when I was applying for jobs. I had reasons for applying to hundreds of companies through different sources and I used google spreadsheet to keep track. I felt it was not enough when I started getting updates and keeping track of previous conversation became painful. So I put together a django application to do this. I just pushed it to github [1] I didn't need much of features on web UI, I used default admin app.
I never thought of searching for something like this, so options suggested in comments here are new to me, and not being arrogant but if I have to do job search again then I will still use my django app because - its good enough, self hosted, can modify at any time, etc.
however, to answer your question: Yes, I do feel there is a need for no-bs-app for doing this. Not everyone is a developer, they do need ready-to-use app.
will I pay? : if I am looking for switch from current one then probably, if I don't have a job then no.
If you need any help with workflows, feedback, ux etc, would be glad to help (for free)
It's hard to envision meeting every applicant's needs with a single webapp. Excel and such may have a lack of depth to them, but at least it's easy to add any kind of data you need anywhere. Can you think of everything that any type of applicant might want, and put it all in there without also making it overwhelmingly complex to use?
The financial pressures on something like this could become awkward. Your target audience is applicants, but not many of them are going to be willing to spend money on something like that. But hiring companies are also going to be very interested in this, especially if you're doing any kind of tracking across multiple applicants over longer periods of time. And they are willing to spend quite a lot of money on the recruiting process. If you get much traction, you may find yourself in a situation where you're making peanuts off of ads or something, not even compensating your hosting costs or personal development time, while multiple huge companies are offering you big bucks if only you'll do a couple of things the way they want.
However, I have a lot more features I'd love to implement than a simple organizer.
Another way to verify the need for this rather than asking directly would be to mockup some realistic screenshots, make a fancy launching soon website and harvest emails. If you get a bunch, go build it. If you get only a few, forget about it.
I guess the main thing that would be missing is direct integration of emails sent to and from the various companies.
Useful as it reminds me what I applied for when the recruiter calls me months after applying.
Not sure if an app is really needed.
If apps showed us something is that people are interested in everything ... until you ask them money.
I guess a free application organizer could be relatively easily monetised by targeted job ads though...
Lets say you applied at Google/FB/Apple/30 Start Ups.
You have issues remembering all of the statuses of the applications, as trying to remember 30+ jobs is hard. Follow ups, Emails, Stages, Interesting Links you found on their recruiting process, To Dos, Resume Version sent (if you applied to couple of positions and highlighted different skills). Point of Contact, Last contact. List of contacts.
Report page showing companies with most interactions.
Offer page showing offers you have received and comparing them.
having a system like this gives you a massive amount of data which has immense value for visitors/users (and you as a company). Big players who are notoriously slow / lazy / arrogant in their feedback would get a real kick in their behind. The same with shady recruiters who are spoiling it for the few good ones.
I think what OP had in mind was a system that lets the job seeker track what was communicated and sent to a certain company. This is an awesome idea for many reasons: You could track which companies are notorious for failing to provide feedback to job seekers (even negative ones) or even shed light on which ones take ages to respond. It would be awesome to have a transparent infrastructure in place that is cloud based, open source, free, tracks these feedbacks in an "open/transparent" manner. I dislike the idea of tying into gmail (or facebook or google or other third party walled garden systems) though. I'd be happy to help on the technical side with requirements, use-cases and maybe even some funding.
Disclosure: one of my current companies works in recruitment but I have a SW development & infosec background. My profile has my contact details if interested.
I suppose you could automate the data update process to the extent that commercial ATS vendors are willing to link up with your system via API. There are even job boards that send notifications when someone views your application, though as a candidate I'm not actually sure whether that makes me more or less concerned about not getting an email back from them...