40 Applications, One Spreadsheet, Zero Mercy: What a Year of Tracking My Own Job Hunt Actually Showed

Somewhere around application number twelve, I realized I had no idea what was happening to my resume after I hit submit. Was anyone reading it? Was it getting eaten by an ATS? Was a hiring manager laughing at my cover letter? The silence was driving me a little insane, so I did what any developer does when faced with an opaque system: I started logging everything.

For one year, every job I applied to went into a spreadsheet. Forty applications total, all for mid-to-senior engineering roles, mostly remote or hybrid, mostly at US companies ranging from a two-person startup in Austin to a fintech giant you'd recognize from their Super Bowl ads. I also made one deliberate change: I converted my beautifully designed PDF resume into a boring plain-text file. No columns, no icons, no color scheme. Just text, formatted like it was 1999.

Here's what a year of data taught me.

The Ghosting Rate Was Worse Than I Expected

Fourteen out of forty companies — 35% — never responded at all. Not a rejection email. Not an automated "we've decided to move forward with other candidates." Nothing. I followed up once with each of them after two weeks, and exactly two replied, both with what I can only describe as apology-shaped form letters.

The ghosting wasn't random, either. The bigger the company, the more likely I was to hear nothing. Companies with more than 5,000 employees ghosted me 46% of the time. Companies under 100 employees ghosted me 11% of the time. My theory: at big companies, your application is a row in a database, and if a keyword filter doesn't like the row, no human ever sees it. At small companies, a real person with a real inbox reads your name.

Which brings me to the plain-text experiment.

Nobody Cared About My Pretty Resume

I split the year in half. For the first twenty applications, I sent my designed PDF. For the last twenty, plain text only. The results were embarrassing — for my design instincts.

The plain-text resume got a response (any response, including automated rejections) from 75% of companies. The designed PDF got a response from 55%. More importantly, the plain-text version got me into first-round interviews at nearly double the rate.

I have a working theory about why. The plain-text file forced everything into a single readable column, which meant ATS parsers couldn't mangle it. My job titles, dates, and skills showed up exactly where they were supposed to. The PDF, with its two-column layout and skill bars (I know, I know), was apparently coming through as word salad to at least some of these systems.

If you're reading this and your resume has a sidebar, I'm not saying burn it. I'm saying send the ugly version and see what happens. The worst case is the same silence you're getting now.

Response Times Tell You Who Actually Wants to Hire

The fastest response I got was 41 minutes, from a startup in Denver whose CTO had apparently been refreshing the applicant queue himself. The slowest was 67 days — a rejection from a company I'd genuinely forgotten applying to, which felt like receiving a postcard from a past life.

The median first-response time across all forty applications was six days. But here's the pattern worth paying for: response speed predicted everything. Companies that replied within three days were dramatically more likely to move me through the process quickly and make reasonable offers. Companies that took two weeks to send a generic rejection were also, in my experience, the ones that would take two months to schedule a second-round interview.

Slow hiring wasn't just annoying — it was a signal. The two offers I eventually fielded both came from companies that had responded within 72 hours of my application. Meanwhile, one company strung me along for four months across seven interviews before quietly closing the req. I checked the spreadsheet. Their initial response time had been nineteen days. I should have seen it coming.

The Spreadsheet Changed How I Applied, Too

An unexpected side effect: logging everything made me a less desperate applicant. When a rejection came in, it stopped feeling like a verdict on my worth and started feeling like a data point. "Company #23, rejected after phone screen, 9-day turnaround, feedback: none provided." Cool. Next row.

It also killed my habit of customizing cover letters into oblivion. The data showed my response rate was essentially identical whether I wrote a tailored letter or a short three-sentence note saying why the role interested me. So I stopped writing essays. That alone saved me hours per week.

What I'd Tell Myself at Application Zero

Three things, in order of importance:

First, send the plain-text resume. It's not pretty, but pretty was never the bottleneck.

Second, treat slow responders accordingly. A company that takes three weeks to acknowledge you exists will not suddenly become efficient once you're an employee.

Third, track everything, because the alternative is letting your brain write the story. Without the spreadsheet, I would have remembered this year as "nobody responded to me." With it, I can see that plenty of people responded — a handful of them fast, a few of them kindly, and one CTO in Denver within the hour. The hiring process is opaque, but it isn't random. It just refuses to show you the logs.

So I kept my own.