Update your job applications from your inbox

Why trackers go stale

Saving an application takes a moment. Keeping it current is the part that slips. A rejection lands on a Tuesday, an interview invite arrives while you are busy, and two weeks later your pipeline says you have eleven live applications when you have four.

That matters more than it looks. Follow-up reminders fire for roles that already said no. Your interview rate reads lower than it is. And the one company you meant to chase gets lost among the ones that are finished.

The fix is a short weekly pass where something else does the reading.

Most people try to solve this with discipline: a reminder to update the spreadsheet every Friday. It works for two weeks. The replies are already written down in your inbox, with dates. What is missing is someone to read them and copy the result across.

What you need

Three things in the same assistant: a Lamr account connected to it, an email connector such as Gmail, and five minutes. Claude and ChatGPT both offer email connectors. Check what yours can reach before you start.

Lamr has no access to your inbox in this setup. The assistant reads the mail, works out what changed, and asks Lamr to update a status or a date. The email itself stays where it is unless you ask for a line of it to be saved in an application's notes.

Step 1: find the replies, change nothing

Start by looking. This prompt only reads:

Look in my email for messages from the last 14 days about job applications: rejections, interview invitations, requests to schedule, offers, and automatic confirmations. Then list my applications in Lamr. Match each email to an application by company and role. Show me a table: company, role, what the email says, the current status in Lamr, and the status you would set. Don't change anything yet.

Read the table before you go further. Two things go wrong most often. A company with several open roles gets matched to the wrong one, and an automatic "we received your application" message gets read as progress. Neither is a reply from a person.

Ask for the email's date and sender in the table if you want to check a row yourself. If an email does not match any saved application, it is usually a role you applied to before you started tracking. You can have it added as a new application, or leave it out.

Step 2: approve the updates

When the table looks right, say which rows to apply:

Apply rows [1, 3 and 4]. For the interview, add the date and the interviewer's name to that application's notes. For anything still marked applied with no reply after two weeks, set a follow-up for [date].

Lamr's statuses are draft, generated, applied, interview, offer and rejected. Moving several applications to the same status happens in one step, and if one of them fails the rest still go through and you are told which did not.

If something looks wrong afterwards, ask what changed. Lamr keeps a history for each application that says what was changed, when, and whether it came from the app or from an assistant.

Show me the history for my [company] application. What changed today and where did the change come from?

Make it a weekly habit

Once the first pass has caught you up, the weekly version is short:

Check my email for job application replies since last [Monday], match them to my Lamr applications, and show me the updates you would make. Then show me which follow-ups are due this week.

For an interview invitation, ask for interview questions for that role while you are there. It uses credits, and it is built from the posting and your own resume.

This does not send anything. A follow-up email is drafted for you to read, edit and send from your own account.