We rise by lifting others.

Who's behind it

Jobtracker is built by James Graham, the person behind Calculate.co.nz, New Zealand's largest free calculator site, and its global sibling CalculatorHub.com. James is a data and analytics professional and former quantitative analyst who studied Human Geography and Social Anthropology alongside mathematics and statistics at the University of Auckland. He works from a small village in Canterbury, west of Christchurch.

That mix matters more than it sounds. The analytics background keeps the numbers honest: every tax rate traced to IRD's published tables, checked as a routine, not a one-off. The social science is the reminder that behind every number is a real person making a real decision, often late at night.

The story, briefly

In 2009, in the middle of the global financial crisis, James was one of the people the economy had knocked sideways. A free government programme called "Be Your Own Boss" gave him structure, confidence and a small grant. Small help, at exactly the right moment. It changed the course of his life, and it set the mission he's followed since: pass that help forward, at scale, without a bill at the end.

He couldn't outspend the big players, so he outworked them, building simple tools that answered the exact question people actually had. The first GST calculator went up in 2011 and hit the top of Google within weeks. Two hundred websites later, that portfolio became Calculate.co.nz: 2,000+ free calculators and hundreds of plain-English guides, used by 1.5M+ people a year, free forever, no sign-up, no paywall.

One thread runs through all of it: taking information that used to sit behind a gate and handing it to the people it is actually about. Jobtracker points that at the job hunt, where the employer knows the band, the process and the timeline, and the candidate is told almost none of it.

Why Jobtracker

James has owned jobtracker.co.nz since 2021, and the idea is older than that. Almost everyone runs a job hunt from memory, a spreadsheet and a dozen email threads. Most of the tools that exist are American, and none of them knows NZ tax: they've never heard of PAYE or KiwiSaver, and some of them bill by the week, in US dollars, while you're unemployed.

So Jobtracker is built NZ-first: real take-home pay on every job, the Work and Income record written for you, scam checks tuned to the patterns NZ Police and Netsafe actually warn about, and a straight answer, after tax, to "which offer really pays more?" It works alongside Seek, LinkedIn, ZEIL and company careers pages, and it never lists jobs of its own.

A job hunt is a project that turns up at the worst possible time, and almost nobody gets to practise. It runs for weeks or months, it carries money, deadlines, strangers and your own morale, and the tools people reach for were built for other work: a spreadsheet that cannot remind you of anything, a calendar that knows nothing about the role, and an inbox where the one thread you need is under forty you do not.

New Zealand is where the gap shows. Pay is quoted before tax, so the number that decides whether you can take the job is what lands after PAYE, ACC, KiwiSaver and any student loan. On Jobseeker Support you have to be able to show what you have been doing to find work, whenever Work and Income asks. Public-sector roles are scored against selection criteria rather than read like a letter. Agencies represent you to employers, and two of them can put you in front of the same employer without either one telling you. A visa can decide which employers are able to hire you at all. None of that is in a product built for somewhere else, and none of it is optional here.

The money side is deliberate too. Jobtracker is free while you are between jobs, with no card and nothing to prove, and it is paid for by people who subscribe while they are in work and moving. Your data is never sold or shared, there are no ads, and the export button and the erase button both do exactly what they say. Because it lists no jobs, there is nothing here to sell an employer and no reason to keep you applying.

There are things it will not do. It will not scrape the job boards or pretend to be a browser it is not: capture happens on your own device, from pages you were already reading. It will not bill you by the week, and it will not hold your history to ransom if you stop paying. The hunt stays yours. Jobtracker keeps the record straight, does the arithmetic, and tells you the next sensible move.

What we do, in one breath

Three jobs, done properly:

And we build for the market as it actually is. In mid-2026, unemployment sits at 5.6% and roughly 440,000 New Zealanders want more work than they have (Stats NZ, June 2026 quarter). Applications per advertised role have surged. In a market like that the organised candidate has the edge, and the person between jobs deserves every free tool we can give them.

The exact answer at exactly the right moment can change the course of someone's life. It changed mine.

What Jobtracker believes

• We take your word for it. If you say you're between jobs, we believe you. A job hunt is hard enough without having to prove you need the help.
• The person comes before the funnel. No dark patterns, no weekly billing, no countdown timers. If the product is good, honest pricing is enough.
• Information wants to be in your hands. Employers know the salary band, the market rate and the process. You should too.
• Small help at the right moment changes lives. A follow-up nudge. A clear number. A report that writes itself the week you needed a win.

What we're building

No New Zealander should ever walk into a job hunt, or a salary conversation, alone and in the dark. Everything above is in service of that sentence. Over the next few years it looks like this:

• Salary transparency as public infrastructure. Real accepted salaries, aggregated and published back to every Kiwi, so "what should I ask for?" finally has an honest answer. Anonymised salary statistics are on by default; one toggle in Settings turns them off. In time, a quarterly NZ Job Hunt Index: what roles pay, how long hunts take, where the market is genuinely moving.
• The between-jobs months made humane. Obligations automated, scams flagged before they cost anyone money, effort counted even when the market goes quiet, and dignity as the default setting.
• Free for whoever needs it most, forever. Funded by fair subscriptions from people in work, never by selling the very data people trusted us with.

Inside the project there's one measure that outranks revenue: the moments where Jobtracker was exactly the help someone needed, when they needed it. The Work and Income record finished the night before a case-manager meeting. The follow-up that revived a dead application. The number that turned a lowball into a fair offer. Every new feature is judged by whether it adds to those.

New Zealand first, and properly: the take-home engine, the guides, the Work and Income record, the salary story, all of it tuned to this country's rules and rhythms until Jobtracker is simply what you use when you're looking for work here. Then across the Tasman, where job seekers face the same two gaps: hidden salaries, and imported US tools that bill in someone else's currency. The ambition is for Jobtracker to be the job-hunt layer for Australasia. It will never be a job board, and it will always be on the candidate's side.

Every rate in Jobtracker (PAYE brackets, the ACC earner levy and its cap, student loan thresholds, KiwiSaver, benefit rates in the runway calculator) is built from primary sources and reviewed on a schedule, the same discipline that runs Calculate.co.nz. If you ever find an error, tell us and it gets fixed promptly. That sentence has been on Calculate.co.nz for fifteen years.

Two promises, one family

Calculate.co.nz carries a promise that will never change: everything on it is free, for everyone, forever. Jobtracker comes from the same maker and makes a different promise, so here it is in full:

James doesn't do the spotlight: no TV, few interviews, and this page is about as autobiographical as he gets.