I have a new project that I'm swirling around in my brain.

I've recently started the job hunt, and quickly became frustrated with the tools at my displosal for networking and thinking about my professional development. We've all seen beautiful visualizations detailing the journey to the offer. And there are countless resources to help those of us just starting out navigate the intimidating world of professional networking. Additionally, I've often taken "notes" that I want to remember about my people, that get buried in a virtual contact file.

For my job apps and potentials, I started a spreadsheet. However, it was hard to figure out a schema that captured everything I wanted to keep track of over time, when each process had a different cadance of milestones. On top of that, long-form note taking didn't vibe with the tabular nature of a sheet.

I want to keep track of several things;

  • People
    • People can have any number of "sub-people," like family members
    • They also have dates associated with them, like birthdays or professional milestones
    • And locations, such as hometown or where you met
  • Companies
    • These have people and jobs associated with them
  • Events/Moments
    • Events are pretty arbitrary; from interviews, to conversations, to conferences
  • Job applications
    • These involve all of the above!

Say I'm recruiting for a job, and there are multiple rounds involving multiple people and conversations. Maybe the Job entry in my data book looks like this;

recruitment process

All of the field entries tend to have things in common. They occur chronologically, involve people, and you definitely want to take notes. But, there are an un-specified number of milestones here, and each milestone can have a flexible number of people as well as optional fields, such as the "location" of the first event.

If I'm trying to keep track of these, along with say, conversations and facts about the people in my network, how does it make sense to store this information? I think it becomes pretty evident that a record-based relational solution doesn't quite seem right... Instead, I need something unstructured and flexible. I'm considering document driven and graph solutions. Or maybe a combination of both?

Stay tuned for more!