Job Hound is a tool for managing the process of applying for a tech job (generally programming). It lets you easily capture the information about the job, gives you a place to write a cover letter, store notes and keep track of where you are in the job application process. I recently went through a job hunt and what I found is that after about 15 job applications, I had 15 different cover letters (one per job), 37 odd sets of notes (at least one set of notes per interview and there were multiple interviews per job), 5 home work coding projects and, honestly, no clue where I stood for each job. That’s when I knew that I needed to create Job Hound.
Evernote is a great, great tool (I’m a user too) but it isn’t the same. Evernote can keep track of your jobs but it doesn’t recognize them as jobs per se and that applying for a job is a multi step process. Job Hound keeps track of every job you interact with and, based on your interactions with each job, ranks everything. This let’s Job Hound offer a feature like “Show Me All Cover Letters organized by Most Successful at the top”. When you’re applying for a job and you need to write a cover letter, there is always the tendency to grab your the last one you wrote – but was that one actually any good? Don’t you want to find the cover letter that got you farthest towards a job? To Job Hound that’s a built in report. With Evernote, you’re still reliant on your own memory.
Thanks to Winston Kotzan, a friend and early beta tester, who asked this as his very first question.
Well it helps you with jobs. And dogs are cool. Even though I’m a cat person, I have to acknowledge that dogs are cool. And I needed a name. Any marketing folk out there that want to help? ;-)
Absolutely nothing – Job Hound is 100% free. Enjoy!
Absolutely. While I built this for my personal search for a good tech job, it is absolutely useful for non tech jobs as well (just ignore some of the tech job stuff like “Passed Coding Test”).
Right now Job Hound is just plain free. I needed it for my own job search so why not make it free? But if you find it useful and iff (that’s if and only if) you get a job then consider [sending some \($ my way as a donation](/pricing). Think of it like leaving tip in a restaurant or, well, putting some\)$ in that homeless guy’s cup. I’m not proud.
As noted above, this is something I absolutely, desperately needed for my own use. And when you build anything web based, if you’re smart, hosting on the right company (Digital Ocean) is dirt cheap so why not open it up to other people? And I’ve always found that the best way for any engineer to improve his skills is to:
So this is free and what I get out of it is that I will become a better engineer. I saw this back in 2003 when I built the Feedster blog search engine (which was also free). Sure if I do this right and build an audience, maybe this is actually valuable but that’s a long, long, long way away. Just leveraging this to improve my skills is a goal in and of itself.
Honestly it beats me. The over hiring process for tech jobs seems to have changed. Where once upon a time it was a resume and then a technical screen and then a job offer, now it is more like:
The focus in technical hiring seems to have changed from a fast paced, get people in the door approach to a “don’t possibly ever hire the wrong person (and opt to over reject almost everybody)”. Given how complex the hiring process has become, there are three obvious conclusions:
A job tracking system is a tool which does just that – it keeps track of jobs. Employers use tools all the time to manage applicants (typically Candidate Tracking Systems) but, until now, there hasn’t been any tools for the person trying to get a job.
Job metadata is automatically imported from jobs on:
provided that you use our bookmarklet.
When I started applying to jobs, I originally used a Google Docs spreadsheet but what I found was that while this worked with just a handful of jobs, I quickly started losing track of things like “What’s going on with my Wedding Wire application” or “Where is the great cover letter I wrote for SevaTec that got a near instant reply”. What I ultimately found was that while it seems like using a tool like Job Hound might take longer than a spreadsheet, it actually doesn’t at all.
Absolutely. I recently went on a job hunt and I found the process so abysmally hard that I wrote Job Hound just because I needed it. And since I can offer it for free, I made the decision to do so.
Sure. I’m fuzzygroup on skype and normally online. My email is on the contact page.