An update on the Job Search Tracker, why I chose the charities I did, and where to find me if you need help.
My last Rebellion Report gave you the statistics as they stood that day. The application numbers have kept climbing since. They are in the hundreds now, and the callbacks haven’t kept pace. I am not going to keep quoting the count, because the exact number is not what matters. What matters is what a person can learn from their own search while it is happening. That is the reason the tracker exists, and a lot has changed in it since launch.
What the Job Search Tracker does
I never felt the tracker got its due on this site, so here is the full picture. It is a bundle of files that runs in your own browser. There is no account and no subscription, and the tracker’s files send no data anywhere. Your search history stays on your machine.
The Active Tracker is your working list.
- Log every application with its date, company, position, method, source, and the resume version you sent.
- Every status change is recorded in a running history, so you can see how each application moved.
- Track interviews round by round, with interviewers and follow-ups for each round.
- Log contact follow-ups with reminder dates, for applications where a real person can be reached.
- A 90-day stale panel flags anything with no activity, so nothing disappears unnoticed.
- Bulk actions let you update many records at once.
The Archive is where rejected, ghosted, and mutually ended applications go. When you record an outcome, the tracker asks when you received it and whether a person spoke with you first, then files it from those facts: early (0 to 7 days), later, after a recruiter screen, after an interview, ghosted, or ended by mutual agreement. You can restore anything to active if a recruiter comes back, and you can add interviews to archived records after the fact.
The Analytics Dashboard turns the list into answers.
- Application to interview. The share of your jobs that led to an interview, how many rounds your interviews run, how many reach a second round, and the median days from application to first interview.
- Outcomes by resume version. How each version you send is doing, including interview and offer rates, not only rejections.
- Outcome breakdown by type. A donut chart of your whole archive, plus a stacked bar for each resume version.
- Outcomes by channel. How you applied and where the posting came from, with small-sample warnings.
- Additional inclusions. Whether applications with a cover letter, references, or a writing sample were rejected more or less often than ones without. This shows correlation, not cause, and the dashboard says so.
- This week’s activity. How many applications you submitted this week, and how many of them are still active.
- Application pace. Your average applications per week, your last four weeks, and your highest and lowest weeks, with a chart. It counts effort, not results, and the dashboard says so.
- Optional DOL reporting module. A personal tracking aid if you are receiving unemployment benefits. It does not verify any state’s requirements.
It also comes with a Quick Start Guide, a full User Guide, and a guide called How to Read Your Data. That last one is about what the patterns might mean, what they cannot show, and what to check next. The tracker shows where your search narrows. It cannot tell you why an employer decided anything, and what to change is still your call.
What’s new
I keep updating the tracker whenever a new idea or a bug turns up in my own search. The biggest recent change is an overhaul of the analytics. The tracker now separates a rejection that comes with no human contact from one that comes after a recruiter screen or an interview. It also measures what many trackers skip: how many applications become interviews, and how far those interviews go. If most of your applications end in the first week, the problem is probably at the front end: the roles, the keywords, or the version you sent. If interviews stop after round one, the question is how your history lines up with what the employer said they needed. Those are different problems with different fixes, and a plain list hides the difference.
Interview handling got better too. Removing an interview no longer removes the application. If you change an application’s status away from Interview Scheduled, the tracker asks whether to keep the interview record. A rejection or a mutual decision that happens during an interview can now be recorded as exactly that.
Why these causes
I started this company because I believe you should try to leave the world a little better for having been in it. That can sound like a slogan, so here is what it means in practice: the causes I chose, and the reasons behind each one.
Workers’ rights. Workers’ rights are human rights. That wasn’t a campaign slogan when I started this. It was the foundation, and it’s the reason this brand exists. Workers get treated as disposable by employers, and too many have no union and no real protection, here and around the world. In 2025, only 10.0 percent of U.S. wage and salary workers belonged to a union, and in the private sector it was 5.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Everyone else negotiates alone against an employer with more money, more lawyers, and more time. Hundreds of applications in my own search have shown me how little an applicant’s time and effort count for on the other side of the screen.
Independent creators. Music, television, and movies have played a very important part in my life since my early years, listening to Beatles records before I even knew what music was. I also volunteer as a consultant for an independent filmmaker who runs Roku channels, so I see up close what it takes to keep independent work alive. Corporate direction is squeezing the life out of entertainment: the same franchises, the same formulas, decisions made by people who never make anything. Independent work is where free expression still lives, where someone can make a strange, personal thing without asking a committee for permission. These organizations help creators survive long enough to make it.
Survivors of rape, sexual assault, trafficking and domestic violence. I’ve watched survivors get blamed and demonized for what was done to them. That’s wrong. These are crimes of opportunity, where someone is targeted because they were vulnerable or in the wrong place. None of them welcomed it. The system often lets them down as well: RAINN estimates that of every 1,000 sexual assaults, 310 are reported to police, and only 25 perpetrators are sentenced to incarceration. The organizations I listed offer what the system often doesn’t: shelter, counseling, legal help, and someone who believes the person in front of them.
Sex workers’ rights. It’s workers’ rights, and it deserves its own line. I know people in the industry. A 2015 UK survey of 240 sex workers found that more than 70% had previously worked in healthcare, social care, education or charities, and 38% held an undergraduate degree. A 2023 Mashable feature profiled former tech workers who left their field for sex work, citing sexism and burnout. Academic research on student sex work, summarized by Carleton University’s Megan Rivers-Moore in Reading the Room (Concordia University Press, 2024, open access, Chapter 3), notes that while the literature is still small, research to date shows that students largely move into it out of economic necessity, driven in part by rising tuition and student debt. These are people doing work that comes naturally to them, in a world that seems to value them only as objects anyway.
Climate and animal welfare. I’ve rescued animals for years and adopted from shelters, so I have seen that side of it up close. In 2025, an estimated 5.8 million dogs and cats entered U.S. shelters and rescues, and about 597,000 were euthanized, according to ASPCA figures. And the science on climate change is settled. NASA reports that about 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening, and that most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide endorse that position. It will bring real hardship, to people and animals alike, unless we reverse the decisions being made at the top of corporations and governments.
Veterans and military families. Both my grandfathers served, and neither of them ever talked about it. My paternal grandfather was in the Army, in Italy. He died when I was ten or eleven, before I knew to ask. I have his dog tags and other things from his service, and they were how I learned he had served at all. My maternal grandfather was in the Navy. I knew the ship was the Housatonic, but not what the ship did during WWII, and I learned that only after he passed, in part from service records I requested from the military a few years ago. My grandparents practically raised me, so this one is personal.
Growing up, the veterans I knew had served in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, and their experiences were not the same. Those who served in Vietnam came home to indifference and often hostility, and many were left to fend for themselves. That is a matter of open record. Veterans of more recent wars, including friends of mine who served in Kosovo and Germany, have their own fights. It appalls me that politicians bring veterans out at events and in policy fights so it looks like they’re acting for them, and then forget them. HUD’s 2025 count found 32,495 veterans experiencing homelessness. These organizations show up when the cameras leave.
TTRPG creators and accessibility. I’ve played tabletop games since 1980, and as a volunteer and leader in an organized play community, I see both halves of what keeps this hobby alive. The first is the table. I believe games are for everyone, and accessibility support is one way to keep gatekeeping out of gaming. A game table is one of the few places where strangers sit down and build something together, and nobody should be turned away from it because of a disability or who they are.
The second half is the people who make the games. Behind every book, map, and adventure are writers, artists, designers, and publishers, many of them freelancers and small studios, and they depend on players who buy, run, and talk about what they make. Creators give us countless hours of enjoyment and need our support.
International solidarity. Workers’ struggles don’t stop at a border, and neither does cruelty. Demonizing immigrants is nothing new. There’s a line in Blazing Saddles, “We don’t want the Irish,” that is funny and not funny at the same time. Some of my ancestors came off the boat from Ireland, and I have to wonder if they went through the same thing. My family history also runs through Scotland and Hungary or Czechoslovakia, depending on which record you believe.
A friend of mine in the First Nations of Canada shared stories a few years ago about the church-run residential schools, many of them Catholic, where Indigenous children were held, about the mass burials found at them, and about the cruelty and abuse. It made me angry. I had already left the church I grew up in as a teenager, over its hypocrisy, and I have not gone back to any religion since. Learning more afterward, including this, only confirmed that I made the right choice. More recently it has been Ukraine and Russia’s attacks on civilians. The wars, the cruelty, the treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers, and governments overstepping and denying people their rights make me angry, and sick. These organizations work across borders for people who have no one else speaking for them.
Listing an organization means I admire its work. No organization has agreed to anything, and nothing is owed to anyone until Phase 4 agreements are signed. You can see the full list, and how the money works, on the Aligned Charitable Organizations page.
What I’m asking you to do
If you are job hunting, try the Job Search Tracker. It is $25, one time, with no subscription. Every sale goes first to recovering startup costs and keeping this business running. After that, the profit is shared with the causes above.
If you are not looking but you know someone who is, tell them about it. Send them this post. People in a long search often stop asking for help, and a friend passing along a tool can matter more than another job board.
Need help with operations?
I also take on consulting work. The details on the consulting page have been updated to show more clearly where I can help: multi-site operations, program and team leadership, IT and service management, and community platform operations. My background spans telecommunications, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, financial services, and volunteer community operations. If you have an operations problem, get in touch.
Follow the Rebellion
Workers’ Rebellion now has a LinkedIn Page, so you can follow the business there as well as here. You can also find us on the other social media pages:
Thank you for reading, and for passing it on.
— Joel
Workers’ Rebellion LLC
Updated October 9, 2026, to clarify the wording around weekly activity in the tracker features list.