How to make a job search Sankey diagram, and what yours says about your hunt

The stages worth counting

A Sankey diagram works because every band adds up: what flows into a stage equals what flows out of it. So each application has to end in exactly one place. These are the stages that work for a job hunt, in order:

• Applied. Every application you sent, including ones put forward by an agency.
• No reply. Nothing heard three weeks after the closing date or your follow-up. Our article on how long to hear back after applying explains the three-week mark.
• Rejected. A no before any conversation.
• Waiting. Still open, with no answer yet. Leave this out and recent applications vanish into "no reply" too early.
• Phone screen. A first call with a recruiter or the hiring manager.
• Interview. A formal interview, whatever the number of rounds.
• Offer, then accepted or declined.
• Withdrew. You pulled out, at whatever stage it happened.

Count rejections and withdrawals at the stage they happened, so a no after a screen is "rejected after screen", not "rejected". That one habit is what makes the diagram worth reading.

Turning your counts into a diagram

Free diagram tools such as SankeyMATIC take plain text, one flow a line, written as the source, the number in square brackets, then the target. It needs no account, and it exports the result as a PNG or SVG image. Here is a made-up hunt: Aroha, a marketing coordinator in Wellington, ten weeks and 60 applications in.

Check the sums before you draw it. The four lines out of Applied add to 60, the two out of Phone screen to 9, and the three out of Interview to 5. If a stage's outflows come to less than its inflow, the tool draws the gap as a band to nowhere, which usually means you lost track of a few applications.

Give each stage name the same spelling every time. "Phone screen" and "Phone Screen" are two different boxes to the tool.

Reading it: where the hunt leaks

Work out three rates from your counts. In Aroha's hunt, 9 of 60 applications reached a screen (15%), 5 of 60 reached an interview (about 8%), and 2 of 5 interviews ended in an offer. Then look for the stage where the band thins most. Each leak points to a different fix:

• Most applications end in no reply or an early rejection. The problem is before anyone talks to you: the roles you choose, or a CV that does not show the match in the first few lines. Our article on applying and getting no interviews works through the causes in order.
• Screens that stop there. You are getting noticed, so the CV is doing its job. The first call is where it ends, often on pay expectations, availability or a weak answer to "tell me about yourself". Our article on the phone screening interview covers what that call is checking.
• Interviews without offers. You are close. The fix is preparation and examples with results in them; our interview preparation timeline sets out what to do from the invitation to the day.
• Offers you decline. Worth a look too. Several in a row usually means the pay or the role was unclear before you applied, and asking earlier saves everyone time.

A thin band can also mean too few applications to judge. Before changing everything, check how many you are sending against how many interviews you need; our article on how many jobs to apply for a week does that arithmetic.

New Zealand context for your numbers

A New Zealand hunt has a few habits that change how the diagram reads.

It is a small market. In many fields there are only a handful of employers, recruiters move between them, and people know each other. A diagram with 200 applications in a narrow field may mean you are applying to the same few organisations again and again. Fewer, better aimed applications often widen the band to a screen.

Public sector processes are slow. Shortlisting can happen weeks after the closing date, and panels and reference checks add more. Keep public sector applications in "Waiting" longer before you move them to "No reply", or the diagram will show a leak that is only a delay. Our guide to public sector applications explains how they are assessed.

Count agencies separately. An application an agency put forward goes through the recruiter first, so its first stage is really their call with you. To see whether agencies or your own applications do better, start the diagram with two sources, such as "Direct [48] Applied" and "Agency [12] Applied", or draw a second diagram for agency work.

Drawn from your board, with no counting

Counting by hand works once. Keeping it current every week is the hard part, and it is where most of these diagrams stop. In jobtracker.co.nz the same picture comes from the stages you already move your jobs through.

Under Insights, "Your funnel" counts every job that ever reached each stage, closed ones included: applied, reached screening, reached interview, reached offer and accepted. Below it, "Where every application went" draws each application from Applied to where it stands now, on to the next stage, still waiting, or closed, with the closed ones counted by the reason you gave, such as presumed ghosted, they declined or listing expired. On a phone it becomes one row per stage, so nothing is cut off. Under that, a line gives your rates from application to screening, application to interview and interview to offer, and a table shows which sources your interviews actually come from.

To see it on a real-looking hunt, open the demo and choose Insights, under How it's going: Sam's 22-job hunt, drawn as a flow, with no account needed.

Let your board draw it