Job application tracker template: a free spreadsheet built for job hunting in NZ

Download the free job application tracker (an .xlsx spreadsheet that opens in any spreadsheet app, on a computer or a phone). It has three sheets: Applications, Work and Income, and How to use it. Three example rows are marked "Example: delete me", so you can see how a filled-in row looks before you clear them.

What is in the spreadsheet

The Applications sheet has one row per job and these 15 columns, in this order:

Days quiet does the work. It turns amber at 7 days, when one short follow-up is due, and red at 21 days, when it is time to close the application. It goes blank once the stage is Accepted or Closed, so only live applications are counted. Our article on how long to hear back after applying explains why those two marks work, and what to send at each.

Two habits keep it honest. Change Last contact every time there is contact in either direction, including your own follow-up. And because many employers look at nothing until an ad closes, Days quiet counts only from Last contact: once the date in Ad closes has passed with no word since you applied, set Last contact to that date. The count then starts from when the employer started reading.

The Work and Income sheet

If you are on Jobseeker Support, the second sheet keeps a dated list of what you did to look for work, in five columns: Date, What you did, Employer, Job and What happened. Work and Income's page on obligations for Jobseeker Support, updated on 23 July 2026, says people with full-time work obligations need to take reasonable steps to get a suitable job, attend suitable job interviews and interviews with Work and Income, work with Work and Income to plan how they will find a job, and let Work and Income know how they are meeting their obligations as often as it reasonably requires. A dated list is a simple way to show that at an appointment.

Record what you actually do, the day you do it: an application, a follow-up, an interview, a course or seminar, a CV update. How often you report, and what you report, is for Work and Income to say for your situation, so ask your case manager what they want to see, and print the sheet or bring it on your phone. Our guide to Jobseeker Support covers the obligations in more detail.

A worked example at week three

The example rows in the file show single jobs. Here is what the sheet looks like partway through a real hunt. The employers and dates are invented. It is Monday 26 October 2026, three weeks into a hunt for analyst roles in Christchurch, and four applications are live. Only the columns that matter for the week are shown.

Read down Days quiet and the week's work is clear. Kauri Point Bank's ad had no closing date and nobody has replied in 21 days, so that row is red: send a brief closing note, set the stage to Closed, and the row drops out of the count. Harbourline Logistics' ad closed on 19 October, the date in Ad closes, which then went in as Last contact, and a week of silence has turned it amber: one short follow-up today. Pukeko Data Works and Tamaki Mutual are moving, with dates to watch. The Work and Income sheet for the same week would list, by date, the Harbourline follow-up, the closing note to Kauri Point Bank and anything else done that week.

Building your own instead

If you would rather start from a blank sheet, copy the 15 headings above into row 1. With Stage in column F and Last contact in column G, put this in the first row of Days quiet and fill it down:

Then add two conditional formatting rules to that column, amber from 7 to 20 and red at 21 or more, and set the sheet's locale to New Zealand so dates read day first.

Where the sheet stops coping

A sheet like this works well for the first dozen or so applications. As the list grows, the same problems turn up for most people: the sheet does not remind you, the stage history is lost each time you overwrite it, the same recruiter appears under three spellings, and the ad itself lives somewhere else, if anywhere. Our article on how to track job applications goes through each of these and the duplicate-application trap that comes with them.

The ad is the gap that hurts most, because boards take ads down after the closing date, often before the interview. Paste the whole ad into Notes or a separate document when you apply. On a computer, you can instead save the job in one press from Seek, LinkedIn, Indeed, Student Job Search, ZEIL or a careers page, and jobtracker.co.nz keeps the title, employer, listing reference and the whole ad with the job, after the listing comes down.

Moving to a free board by hand

If you move from the sheet to jobtracker.co.nz, there is nothing to import and nothing that reads your spreadsheet. You add each live application by hand, which takes a minute or two each:

• For an ad that is still up, open it and press the one-press button. For one that has come down, use + Add job, with the link in Listing URL and any ad text you kept in Job description.
• Set the stage, which uses the same names as the sheet, and the date you applied, and log your last contact, so the days quiet are counted from the right day.
• Add the person you dealt with as a contact on the job, and anything said about pay.
• Leave the closed rows in the sheet. Bringing across only the live applications keeps the move to a few minutes.

From then on, the sheet becomes your archive and the board holds what is live. Ten live applications is usually a quarter of an hour's work.

When the sheet gets too long