When I first started actively looking for a new job, I thought the hardest part would be finding good vacancies. In reality, the difficult part was staying organized.

At the beginning everything felt manageable. I had a few saved jobs in LinkedIn, some tabs open with company websites, a couple of resumes on my desktop, and notes scattered across Telegram chats and Notion pages. But after a few weeks the process became messy enough that I constantly lost track of things.

I forgot where I had already applied. Sometimes I reopened a vacancy and realized I had already sent an application two weeks earlier. I couldn’t remember which companies replied, which ones rejected me, and which ones simply disappeared. Even worse, I had no understanding of what was actually bringing interviews.

At some point I started treating my job search more like a process that needed structure. That changed the way I approached applications completely.

I had several versions of the same resume

One of the first things I noticed was how much resume titles mattered. I had several versions of the same resume with almost identical content, but different role names: Product Designer, UX/UI Designer, UX Designer. The experience itself barely changed, but the response rate did.

I don’t think recruiters necessarily cared about those distinctions that much, but ATS systems clearly did. Some companies searched for exact keywords, so I started adapting the title and wording based on the vacancy. It wasn’t a full rewrite every time, just small adjustments to make the resume closer to the language used in the job description.

Easy apply brought me almost no interviews

At first I relied heavily on LinkedIn Easy Apply because it seemed efficient. I could send many applications quickly, and in the beginning that felt productive. But after a while I noticed that almost none of those applications turned into interviews.

Most of the responses I eventually got came through other channels: direct emails, recruiter posts, Telegram communities, company websites, or LinkedIn posts where someone was hiring directly.

After that I changed the way I searched for vacancies. Instead of only checking the Jobs tab, I started looking through posts, startup announcements, recruiter threads, and niche communities. The process became slower, but the response quality was noticeably better.

I customized my presentation for every company

Another thing that helped a lot was customizing my interview presentation. I already had a deck with case studies prepared in advance, but before each interview I slightly changed the structure depending on the company. I picked projects that were more relevant to their product and added one extra slide explaining why I was interested in that specific company.

Usually it included a few observations about their product, details from their website, or reasons why I thought my experience matched their current stage.

It didn’t take very long to prepare, but the conversations became much easier and more natural afterward. The company immediately saw that I understood what they were building and wasn’t sending the exact same presentation everywhere.

Tracking applications changed the whole process

The biggest improvement came from tracking applications properly. At first I used a simple table where I stored the company name, role, application date, source, status, and notes. Later I added more details, including my own estimate of how realistic the opportunity was for me. For example, if a company explicitly required seven or eight years of experience, I marked it as low probability even if the role itself looked interesting. That helped separate “interesting vacancy” from “realistic opportunity.”

Without tracking, every rejection feels personal because all applications blend together. Once I started looking at the process more systematically, it became much easier to notice patterns.

After a few weeks, the patterns became obvious

The low-effort applications almost never converted into interviews. The customized ones performed much better. Direct outreach worked better than one-click applications. Roles where my experience matched the company stage closely also had a much higher response rate. I eventually settled into a routine where I sent a small number of thoughtful applications every day and a few simpler ones on the side. The difference in results between those two groups became obvious pretty quickly.

After 30–40 applications, the process also became difficult to manage manually. Different resumes, interview stages, recruiter conversations, assignments, salary ranges, follow-ups — all of that starts mixing together if you don’t track it somewhere.

Ironically, this is very similar to problems designers solve in products all the time. You have stages, drop-off points, bottlenecks, and conversion rates. A job search works almost the same way.

Why I’d use a job search CRM today

If I were starting the process again today, I probably wouldn’t build the workflow around spreadsheets anymore. I would want one place where I could manage applications, resumes, notes, interview prep, and analytics together.

That idea eventually became one of the reasons behind AB Job. What helped me most during my search was not sending hundreds of applications. It was understanding which actions actually led to interviews and repeating those more consistently.