Personal Kanban for Job Hunting: How to Organize Your Job Search

Organizing your job search is a large and time-consuming project. Whether you work in tech, marketing, health, or some other field, every company has different requirements and conditions that their potential employee needs to meet. Moreover, the vast majority of large companies host complex job interviews that consist of multiple stages and tests. If you feel intimidated by the whole job search process, perhaps using personal Kanban for job hunting can help you leverage the whole process.

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a framework that helps organize project management. It’s one of the more popular frameworks for helping organize software engineering projects and helps implement the Agile methodology. However, it’s also useful in many applications, one of them being a very useful job application tracker.

One of the best features that Kanban offers as a framework, is a very straightforward tracking board called Kanban Board. The Kanban board allows people to visualize their tasks, making it an ideal productivity tool. However, you can make your personal Kanban for job hunting and turn it into a career board.

Whether you’re about to start searching for your first job and start your career or want to transfer from one company to another, a personal Kanban board can simplify your job hunt in a great matter. You can find out more below.

How to Organize Your Job Search With Personal Kanban?

Creating the perfect job application can be quite difficult and stressful, but it doesn’t have to be. Does your head feel like a huge board full of sticky notes all over the place and you don’t know which one belongs where? Kanban offers a virtual board that you can use to sort and organize all those sticky notes with ease.

Below, we’ll show you how you can use personal Kanban for job hunting. You can use any of the many Kanban-supporting apps, but if you’re looking to create intuitive and clean boards with vibrant cards, we recommend using Kanban Zone.

Using the Traditional Approach

Your job search Kanban board can be very simple, and consist only of three columns, like in the picture below. This simple Kanban board consists only of three containers. We slightly edited the traditional Kanban board container names from To Do, In Progress, and Done to Application, In Progress, and Done.

We added cards of six placeholder companies and distributed them across the Kanban board. The cards in the Application container represent the jobs you applied to and are awaiting your response. Companies located in the “In Progress” container represent the jobs that are in the interview process.

Finally, those in the Done container represent the job applications that were closed, either successfully or unsuccessfully. A good thing about the Kanban Zone Kanban board is that you can change the colors of the cards. That being said, you can set the declined applications to be displayed in red. If you received the job offer from a given company, you can have it displayed in green.

Some Kanban Boards can consist of the Backlog container. A backlog represents a list of ideas that are on the back of your mind, and while you’re not ready to implement them yet, you don’t want to forget them either. You can create a Backlog container for all the companies where you want to send an application but don’t have time right now. Now, we added a few more placeholder companies so that we can fill our Backlog container. Your personal Kanban for job hunting would then look like this:

Backlog is also ideal if you found a company with an ideal open job position for you, but you didn’t research the company enough and don’t know if their ethics and mission are compatible with your own ethics and goals. For that purpose, you can also use the Backlog container.

Lastly, if you want to clean it up even more, instead of having a single container for both offers and declined applications, you can create an extra container where you can sort the declined applications and those where the offer was sent, like in the next picture.

Keeping Up With Individual Application

Many people like to keep a journal about the job hunt process with each application. As the application progresses from start to finish, we learn more about the company and the interview. That’s why it’s good to write about the ambient from the interview, whether the interviewers are courteous, and also note some interview questions as you go.

Some of the details that you can include in the description include:

• Company name and description
• Job locations (you can also include the URL to the website)
• Recruiter and recruiter contact
• Contact phones and emails of the team lead and the technical interviewing team
• Date of the last contact
• Salary
• Whether it’s a remote, hybrid, or on-site type of a job

Many Kanban boards offer a feature that allows you to describe your cards and Kanban Zone is no exception. You can note the specifics of the interviews and what to be cautious about.

Detailed Kanban for Job Hunting

If you work in tech and your job application consists of multiple processes and interviews, you can add more containers to support your job application process. For example, you can add multiple interview changes and move cards from one container to another as the job advances.

Usually, complex interviews consist of three stages (but they are not limited to them) and include relaxed introduction interviews with HR, technical interviews, interviews with team members and team leads, and even an interview with clients if the company you’re applying to is an outsourcing company.

That being said, if you want to organize your personal Kanban for job hunting in detail, this is one of the examples of how your Kanban board may look like:

Conclusion

Kanban board offers numerous solutions and ideas for job hunting and making your personal Kanban for job hunting is just one of them. It’ll be especially helpful for visually oriented people thanks to the thorough organization of every job application. If you need help finding your first job using a personalized Kanban board register on Kanban Zone now and Kanban your job search!