Who's it for
Who's it for Active job-seekers who apply to 10–30 roles a week and lose track of which application is at what stage. Built for anyone tired of manually updating a spreadsheet every time a recruiter replies — or worse, realizing their tracker has been lying to them for two weeks. What it does This workflow runs every morning at 9 AM, scans your Gmail for job-application emails, and uses GPT-4o-mini to extract three things from each one: Company** (the actual hiring company, not the ATS platform) Position** (cleaned of boilerplate like "the role of") Status** (Applied, Interview, Offer, Rejected, or Other) It then writes structured rows into a Google Sheet — one row per application, identified by a Match Key of Company | Position. New applications get appended automatically. Status changes for existing rows (Applied → Interview, Interview → Offer / Rejected) are gated behind a one-tap email approval, so an LLM misclassification can never silently demote a row. How it works Daily 9 AM Trigger ↓ Fetch Gmail (filtered by ATS senders & job-keyword subjects, last 2 days) ↓ Process Email Data (clean & truncate body to 4000 chars) ↓ Extract Key Information (GPT-4o-mini, structured JSON output) ↓ Format Data (build Match Key) ↓ Filter Valid Job Updates ──→ Other ──→ "Other app" sheet tab ↓ Branch by Status ├─ Applied ──→ Track New Application (append row) └─ Interview / Offer / Rejected ↓ Aggregate into single digest ↓ Email & Wait for Approval (sendAndWait) ↓ Merge → Split → Update Application (match by Match Key) Key design choices: Match Key, not Thread ID, drives deduplication.** Recruiters often start new threads for interview scheduling, but the same Company | Position should stay one row. Approval gate only on updates, not appends.** New applications go in directly to keep your inbox quiet. Only status changes — where misclassification matters — require your tap. Aggregation before approval.** You get one digest email per morning, not one per status change. Skim, approve, done. Setup Prerequisites: n8n 1.x (cloud or self-hosted) Gmail account connected via OAuth2 Google Sheets account (same OAuth2 credential works) OpenAI API key with gpt-4o-mini access Steps: Create your tracker sheet. Make a Google Sheet with two tabs: Sheet1 — columns: Thread ID | Match Key | Date | Company | Position | Status | Modified Date Other app — same columns (used for unclassifiable emails) Import this template. Open n8n → Workflows → Import from File. n8n will flag missing credentials. Configure three credentials: OpenAI → used by the Open AI node Gmail OAuth2 → used by Fetch Job Application Emails and Email Updates & Wait for Approval Google Sheets OAuth2 → used by all three Sheets nodes Replace placeholders (search the workflow for these strings): YOUR_GOOGLE_SHEET_ID → your real sheet ID (from the sheet's URL) YOUR_EMAIL@example.com → the address that should receive approval digests Test it manually. Click "Execute workflow" and verify the Gmail node returns recent emails, the LLM extracts clean JSON, and a sample appears in your sheet. Activate. Toggle the workflow to active and it will run daily at 9 AM. Customization Schedule.** Change Daily 9 AM Trigger to any cron expression. Lookback window.** The Gmail filter ends with newer_than:2d. Bump to 7d if your daily run sometimes fails — the workflow handles re-processed emails idempotently because Match Key updates are no-ops on identical data. Languages.** The prompt in Extract Key Information includes English and French status phrases. Add your language's equivalents to each section (Rejected, Applied, etc.). ATS coverage.** The Gmail query covers ~25 ATS providers (Lever, Greenhouse, Ashby, Workday, SmartRecruiters, Welcome to the Jungle, etc.). Add or remove domains to match your job market. Approval timeout.** Add options.limitWaitTime.values.resumeAmount (in hours) to the approval node if you want stale digests to auto-cancel. Honest caveats It's only as accurate as the emails it reads.** Recruiters don't follow a standard format. Misclassifications happen — the human-in-the-loop approval step is your safety net. Read the digest before tapping approve. Status downgrades are possible.** A delayed "thank you for applying" email arriving after an interview invite will offer to demote the row. The approval gate exists for exactly this case. Privacy.** Email subjects and bodies are sent to OpenAI for processing. Don't use this if your job-search emails contain NDAs or confidential info — swap in a local LLM instead. Cost.** Roughly $0.01–0.05 per day at typical job-search volume. Gmail and Google Sheets API calls stay within free quotas. Why I built this Manual spreadsheet tracking lasted me two weeks before it became the chore I'd skip on busy days. By week three the sheet was lying to me — half the "Applied" rows were rejections I hadn't logged yet. So I built this. It's not a system of record; it's a guided draft I skim once a week. The bones might be useful to someone else. An n8n automation workflow template by Pratistha Thapa.
Pratistha Thapa
web
free
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