When you’re looking for a creative job, understand first the different types of hiring for creative positions, and put your best foot forward with those applications. But then, you also have to establish a way to keep track of everything. You might apply to dozens of places. It’s important to organize your job applications, both for your own sanity and so that you don’t miss an opportunity. Here’s how to do it. 

Research

You have to do your research about each individual company—but the process won’t take a lot of time if you do it right. These simple steps are a good place to start:

• Go to the company’s website. Read every single word on the homepage, and think about why the company chose those words as its first impression with its audience.
• Read a few of the company’s latest blog posts to get a sense of the company’s voice and sensibility. Do the same on its social media pages.
• Read the entire “About Us” section of the site. Every word.
• Look into the CEO or Managing Partner on LinkedIn, and note anything that stands out. Leadership sets the tone for the entire company, so look for with a company whose values align with your own.  

Stay Organized

You’ll be assembling a lot of information on dozens of companies, and it’s obviously important to keep it all straight. There are some really great—free!—tools to help you with this.

• Notion
• Chrome Browser with a group of tabs bookmarked
• Hubspot Free CRM

Notion: Organize Your Database

Notion allows you to create a table with all of your gathered information—where you found the job posting, the company name, each social media outlet you are tracking, and the date you applied. Create a column with tags for your stage in the applicant process (for example, stages like applied, interviewed, second interview, rejected).

Once you have all of this information, Notion will let you view your table as a kanban board, so you can see your status in regard to each potential job. You can even leave comments every time you have an interaction with a company or set reminders for when you want to follow up. Notion has a bunch of templates, including ones to help you find a job.

This will also help you when you do get a callback, because when you apply to a lot of places, they all tend to blur together. Now, when you prepare for that big interview, you have a place to start and you can review the research you already did.

Chrome Browser Tab Group: Quick Research

Speed up all of this research by creating a bookmark folder on your browser’s menu bar with a bookmark for each research site. Set up bookmarks for Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Then, when you sit down to find out about a company, go to your bookmark folder and ‘Open All Tabs in a New Window’ (this is how it works in Chrome, but other browsers have this too). Then, copy and paste the name of the company into each search box. When you find their profile, add that to Notion, do some reading, make some notes, and then move on to the next company.

Hubspot Free CRM: Track Your Emails 

Hubspot has a free, lite version of its CRM, which is used by many businesses across the organization. Install this Free CRM and use Gmail on your browser. If you sync the two, you’ll be notified when someone opens your email. If they haven’t and it’s been a while, it may have gone to spam. Try a follow-up, try a different contact, keep working at it—with all of that information seamlessly processed and organized by Hubspot.